For the Record
by Runawaymetaphor
Summary: By the time Starfleet gets around to dealing with the long list of her infractions, it's three months since Voyager has returned home.
1. Trying times

_**For the Record**_

**Chapter 1: Trying times**

When she sits through the first day of hearings at Headquarters, she tries not to concentrate on the anger she feels.

By the time Starfleet gets around to dealing with the long list of her infractions (her repeated bending of the Prime Directive, her complete disregard for the same at least once, her many actions that may have corrupted the timeline) it is three months since _Voyager _has returned home. Her former Maquis crewmembers have finally been exonerated, and most of her them are being given permanent commissions. Everyone is nearly finished with the personal leave they've all been granted, and _Voyager_ is now in dry dock. It's anticipated that after receiving a much-needed overhaul, her ship will once more streak through the stars.

It's equally anticipated that when it does, Janeway won't be on it.

Sitting in her chair, listening to Admiral Hayes voice his concerns regarding the pact she made with the Borg, Janeway tries not to push away her brimming rage. Clutching the arms of her chair with white knuckles, she attempts to focus instead on how good, despite all of this, it is to be home.

She tries. But ultimately she fails.

"I find your decision short-sighted at best, Captain," Hayes pronounces, looking her dead in the eye. "Brutally selfish at worst."

Her face doesn't flinch, but her fingers dig deeper into the soft material of the chair. When she stands up, there will be small crescent imprints from her fingernails, as well as tiny crimson stains.

Despite the resentment that fills her, the blinding sense of betrayal, she doesn't feel surprised. She expelled a lot of political capital fighting for her crew once they hit Earth's atmosphere, and the repeated public comments she made defending them have not sat well with Starfleet Command.

When she first returned home, Starfleet had treated her like a favorite child. The heir apparent to some kind of throne. But then they'd considered casting the former Maquis aside; floated even more unsavory thoughts about Seven of Nine. And she, in turn, had fought them tooth and nail, seizing on every opportunity to publicly voice her criticisms, her profound disappointment. Their golden child chose to embarrass them publicly. And now, of course, they are making her pay. She would be able to find it all somehow tolerable if she thought even a secondary goal of the proceedings was the pursuit of justice. She knows, better than anyone, exactly how much she compromised to get her ship and her crew home.

Walking in the deep Bloomington snow with her mother, and then navigating the grounds of Headquarters in the damp San Francisco air, she knew that she should feel guilty. But she doesn't. Not yet.

She knows, too, that in the end they'll give her only a mild slap on the wrist. A note in her file. Perhaps not even that. But before that, they'll hold her captive to their displeasure. And afterward, they'll pull hard on the reins, make her stay close to keep a watchful eye on her.

When she hears the phrase "the eventual strain of command," her attention drifts. Though their needling remarks anger her, their speculation about what it was like to be in her position fails to retain her interest. She allows her eyes to wander the room.

The large room isn't very crowded, despite that these proceedings are open to all Starfleet personnel, as well as the media. There are a smattering of journalists. A few members of the brass, Owen Paris among. He sits in the center of the graduated auditorium, away from the other Admirals, and when her gaze meets his, his blue eyes are filled with pain. She looks away quickly, continuing to scan the room.

She expects to see the familiar faces of her former crew, despite that she's practically ordered them to stay away from the proceedings. She hasn't done so because she finds all this embarrassing. In truth, she doesn't really. It's just that she still wants to protect all of them. None of the commissions Starfleet has granted go into affect for another week, and it's possible for Command to yank them if they so choose.

She suspects, cynically, that this timing is deliberate, but either way, she doesn't want to tempt fate. Not when she's tempted it far too many times over the last seven years.

Still, she's surprised to note that only one person from _Voyager _has shown up.

Later, laying in bed, this observation will hurt her and she will try to brush those thoughts away. But at the moment, she's too struck by who it is to focus on either the vague sense of disappointment or the phantom of pain in her stomach.

Tom Paris sits at the back of the room instead of with his father, and when she spots him, he's watching Admiral Hayes rather than her. His blues eyes are filled with the blinding anger that has been her companion all day. She thinks it strange, watching him now, that she never noticed that he has the same exact eyes as his father.

Emotion, she muses, can transform any gaze into something unfamiliar.

She's watched countless times as Tom's countenance has transformed over the years. After the destruction of the Caretaker's array; the loss of Kes; his marriage to B'Elanna and the birth of their child. Before that, the encounter with Moneans and the ensuing consequences.

In front of her, she hears Admiral Hayes make another dig at her expense. She sees Tom's barely-contained anger break through, his chin lifting defiantly and his eyes gleaming at the older man with accusation. She realizes then that the anger she sees broadcast across his features isn't the same cynical one that must be faintly etched on her own countenance. His anger is decidedly righteous; the estimation that what is transpiring in font of him is marked injustice.

The resolve that though he can do nothing to stop what's happening, he'll be damned if he'll accept it quietly.

She knows that her crew must have seen this same expression on her own face hundreds of times, and she feels suddenly jarred by the reflection of her own stubbornness, her own unyielding determination, on this man. An officer who she put as much pressure on as she put faith in. A man who is as much a product of her disappointment as he is her hopes and expectations.

Was this the same anger he saw in front of him when she'd pulled the pip from his collar? Had he internalized her disapproval back then, despite his appearance of distance afterward, reaching within himself now to produce the same outrage on her behalf?

This question shakes her more than all of Hayes' insults, and when she finally turns her face from the pilot, she realizes that the day's proceedings are wrapping up. When Owen Paris moves to meet her, her eyes look to where Tom sat, but he's already gone.

Coming out of the building, flanked by the older Paris and her counsel, she sees that her former helmsman is surrounded by journalists. She can't make out their voices, exactly, but one asks him a question, while others shove holo-imagers in his face. She can see the look of pain cross his face though she can't hear his reply. She assumes it's the standard refusal to comment that the rest of the crew has gotten used to giving since arriving back on Earth.

Neither his father nor her lawyer notice the scene, and she's whisked away to the privacy of Owen's office before either her gaze or her thoughts can linger too long.

. . . . .

The next morning, before leaving for Headquarters, she scans the Federation news. Everyone has advised her not to do so. They've told her that the speculation and random bits of information will make her crazy. But she can't help it. She worries that Starfleet will take out its frustrations with her on _Voyager_'s crew. She fears that Chakotay will launch into a public tirade and renounce his commission. That others will follow suit.

Again, she's surprised to see Tom's face instead.

The comment he apparently gave the reporters the day before is eloquent, though obviously unprepared. But it's the look on his face- the sadness and anger that swim in his blue eyes- that makes the vid pure latinum to the media. It plays on loop continuously for hours.

"Do you have anything to say off the record, Lieutenant?"

The reporter's question is downright laughable. Nothing is off the record when it comes to Starfleet and everyone, both inside and out, is acutely aware of this.

Tom shakes his head perceptibly, but then appears to change his mind, looking at the woman and the holo-imager directly.

"Morality isn't a calculation, nor is the admirable person the one who simply does the right thing. Sometimes there are no right actions available. And in those moments . . . the person who proves moral is the one who does what they can with both silent grace and an unflagging responsibility for their actions. "

He pauses, casting his eyes away from the imager.

"For the record, never have I met someone who inhabits life with greater grace or sense of responsibility than that of Kathryn Janeway."

Janeway allows herself to watch the vid half a dozen times before she finally shuts it off. Each time, she feels a different emotion.

When she arrives at HQ grounds, her representative seems in good spirits. Tom's quote has bolstered the public opinion of her as a hero, and even if Starfleet proceedings were more detached from public opinion than everyone knows they are, this is going to make it more difficult for the brass to publicly flog her.

Walking with her to the day's proceedings, Owen seems angry. His anger, however, is obviously tempered by pride.

When things get under way, she doesn't see Tom in the audience, and she wonders whether he's hiding out or has simply left San Francisco for Mars.

B'Elanna has already accepted an engineering position at Utopia Planitia, and Janeway suspects Tom will likely take a position there as well. The more cutting edge ship design is now being done in Australia, rather than on Mars, but she can't imagine Tom will be willing to make the daily commute with a baby in the mix.

Eventually, she gives up looking for him, sinking heavily into her seat as Admiral Nechayev begins, with characteristic coolness, passing harsh judgment on her actions during the _Equinox _affair.

Just before lunch, she spots Tom in the audience. He's all the way in the back again, but today he's taken a seat directly behind her. She catches sight of him only when her counsel leans in to ask her something, and she turns her head to reply.

This time, his eyes meet hers. And though he initially wears the same angry expression as he did the day before, he forces himself to smile when she looks searchingly at him.

She isn't sure if he slipped in late, or she missed him earlier when she examined the crowd. His position is one that's almost entirely obscured from view by a pillar, and she knows immediately that he chose it for that reason.

She suspects he's either hiding from her or from his father, but when the proceedings break and he lingers in his seat, she guesses it was the latter. She manages to disentangle herself with relative speed from Owen's worry and her counsel's questions, and she makes her way up to the room's exit, where Tom stands waiting.

Immediately, they're both engulfed by media, but Tom remains silent, as does she, until they reach the quiet safety of a turbolift.

"Lower level 3, Section 5," Tom calls, not looking at her.

Their silence could be construed as awkward. In some ways, it is. But strangely, Janeway also finds it reassuring.

She has been forced to listen to long, pompous speeches for almost two days. Peppered with questions for over three months. And as content as she is to be standing next to Tom Paris, she's also happy he isn't expecting her to make conversation.

When the lift doors open, they're on a subterranean floor Janeway has never been to before. It's obviously used for storage, and Paris easily picks his way through the dark corridor as his former Captain trails behind him.

When they turn a corner, another turbolift comes into view and Janeway again follows him without question as he gets on. When they emerge at the back of the main floor, just in front of an auxiliary exit, she gives him a knowing look.

"I guess there are perks of having spent my childhood playing in these buildings," he says, a rueful smile appearing on his face.

For the first time in days, Janeway laughs. It's a small laugh, and more due to the relief of avoiding the waiting crowd than because of his dark joke, but she doesn't care. She feels as though part of the crushing weight has been lifted off her chest.

As they emerge into the afternoon sun, she inhales deeply before angling her face to his.

"Thanks," she says simply, squinting her eyes as she adjusts to the sunlight.

They both know she isn't just talking about the escape he just provided, but neither will acknowledge his other act of loyalty.

Neither is especially good at handling softer emotions, and the two of them have a downright awful track record when it comes to such emotions and each other.

"Anytime," he responds breezily, not meeting her gaze.

Making their way through HQ's back grounds, she realizes he's again leading her somewhere.

"Interested in lunch?" he asks, just as she's about to query where they're going.

She isn't particularly hungry, despite that all she's had so far is coffee. But she finds herself agreeing anyway.

"Where?" she asks, as they enter one of the buildings containing transporters.

"Somewhere far way from here," he breathes.

Next to him, she nods solemnly. She couldn't have said it better herself.

. . . . .

Sitting across from Tom in the small restaurant, she knows their silence has now moved solidly into the domain of the uncomfortable. Working slowly on his soup, he looks out at the bay that stretches outside the window, and she looks down at the pasta she's moving around with her fork.

She wasn't particularly surprised when they materialized in Marseilles. Tom had input the coordinates manually, perhaps to avoid the accidental broadcasting of her whereabouts to waiting ears, but it's a place he's familiar with, as well as a city that doesn't have an especially large Fleet presence.

"How's B'Elanna liking her work on Mars?" she finally asks, when the silence becomes unbearable.

"She hasn't started yet," he replies, putting down his spoon.

He knows that this isn't news to her, that she's simply trying to make conversation. The tone of his reply doesn't betray this, however, and looking at him, Janeway again feels grateful.

"But the work seems to be right about her speed." He frowns. "Which is to say frantic and crushing."

The ghost of a smile appears on her face at his statement. B'Elanna's workaholic tendencies rival her own.

"Are you going to take a job in ship design there? Quite a few inquiries about you have passed through my message service."

He sighs when she asks this, and her face shifts from the polite mask she's worn to one of genuine interest. She eyes him intently as he begins to speak.

"No. We've decided that we want to raise Miral on Earth rather than on Mars. It's going to be hard with B'Elanna having to take the transport back and forth everyday, but it makes even less sense for both of us to do it. Not to mention the impossibility of caring for Miral if we did."

His face scrunches as he finishes, but he drops his eyes when he realizes she's watching him.

"So what are you going to do? Have you accepted a position yet?"

"No. I'm still weighing my options."

He swirls his spoon in his soup, though he doesn't take a bite.

"To tell you the truth, I've been a bit more preoccupied with where we're going to live."

At this, she crosses her arms, her eyes narrowing.

"You just said you were going to live on Earth."

He smiles, though the mirth doesn't make its way to his eyes.

"Earth is an awfully big planet." The smile slides from his face. "B'Elanna wants to live in San Francisco. She thinks it will be easier for Miral, being of mixed heritage."

"And what do you think?"

Her tone is neutral, but he knows to be cautious. He came to understand long ago that she could come by impossible confessions with that nonchalant tone and those searching eyes. Still, he doesn't think to be anything but honest.

Righteous anger isn't the only thing the woman across the table has taught him.

"I think. . . Klingons, mixed heritage or not, are more common on Earth now than when B'Elanna and I were kids. I think there are plenty of other cities that would be desirable in atmosphere."

He doesn't vocalize the fact that he himself spent a very painful childhood in San Francisco. That living there, close to his father and all the accompanying memories, will be difficult.

She doesn't expect him to say any of this, and understands what he fails to voice.

"What other cities would you consider?"

It's the same neutral tone, and this time, Tom fails to suppress a knowing smile when he answers her.

"I've always found Sydney lovely."

Now, it's her turn to smile at him.

"And it's so conveniently located near Starfleet's new research center for flight design."

Putting his napkin on the table and throwing back his head, he laughs.

"Well it would be a pity for _both_ of us to have to commute," he says finally, retaining his wry grin.

She chuckles, too. And when the silence resumes between them, it feels companionable rather than awkward.

Walking back to the transporter station, Janeway is shaken from thoughts of the day's proceedings by Tom's voice.

"You know, when this is all over, they're probably going to make you an Admiral."

His voices his prediction without warning. Surprised, she stops and turns to look at him.

His face, as well as the tone he'd used, fail to mask his disdain. Disdain at the hypocrisy of it all. Disdain that they were going to yank her from her ship and tie her to a desk.

"I don't know."

Her reply is non-committal. She doesn't let on that she's had the same thought. Felt the same disdain.

Walking beside her again, he only nods, his face expressionless, even when they beam back to San Francisco.

. . . . .

After three days of hearings and another week of waiting, Janeway receives her slap on the wrist.

It's less than a month before her promotion comes through, and when she looks at Owen with sadness rather than pleasure, he looks at his former protégé with measured affection.

"You don't have to take it, Kathryn."

He's right, of course, but she also knows that it doesn't really matter if she takes it or not.

Either way, Starfleet will find a way to keep her close, to bar her from taking another ship. If she accepts the promotion, her punishment will just come with a nicer office and a few more privileges. When she sends her acceptance to Nechayev, she tries to push away cynical thoughts about gilded cages.

She tries. But again she fails.

The same day her promotion is made official, Owen tells her, concern apparent in his voice, that Tom has yet to commit to a position within Starfleet. He thinks that his son may even be considering resigning his commission altogether.

"He's not taking a position in Australia?" she asks, her voice tipping into concern.

Rearranging PADDs on his desk, Owen shrugs.

"They decided to live in San Francisco. I think Tom now thinks it would be too much hassle with the baby for both of them to have to come back and forth from work."

Janeway's concern follows her all the way home, but as she settles into her evening and her new work, her mind is quickly derailed by other worries.

Two days after her conversation with Owen, she runs into Tom, quite literally. He's standing in front of his father's office, and he turns around to leave just as she comes striding down the hall, her eyes locked on one of the reports in her hand.

"I'm sorry, Admiral," he says, steadying them both before he bends down to help her collect the PADDs that have clattered to the floor.

At the use of her new title, there's no trace of his previous disdain. She eyes him carefully as he reaches for the last PADD.

"Your father told me you haven't taken a position yet," she remarks, after he straightens up and they exchange pleasantries.

He meets her neutral tone with an expressionless face.

"I'm still weighing my options."

"You said that a month ago," she retorts, her tone now sliding uncomfortably close to chiding.

"And it was the truth."

His face shifts slightly, the ghost of a frown appearing.

"But now my options have changed, and I'm weighing them again."

When he finishes, she takes in his expression, as well as his posture. He seems tired, and it's a fatigue she recognizes from the last four years on _Voyager_.

It's the exhaustion, the faint sadness, that always clung to her pilot whenever he'd finished a fight with her Chief Engineer. He got better and better at hiding over the years, but even once he and B'Elanna were married, the small, tell-tale frown always gave it away.

No matter how much he tried to hide it.

"Buy you a cup of coffee, Mister Paris?"

The look he gives her is one of thinly-veiled suspicion.

"I thought you were just going in to see my father."

"Oh, it can wait." She smiles. "Unless, of course, you're turning down the invitation of a Vice-admiral. Which, I warn you, doesn't bode well for your options."

His look of suspicion disappears, replaced by a small smile. She suspects, correctly, that the original sentiment is still there.

"After you, ma'am."

. . . . .

When she offers him a position in her new office, she expects him to turn her down. She expects him to balk, or be offended. Anything, but sipping his coffee with disinterest and agreeing without a fight.

"Sure," he says, and she looks at him incredulously.

"You're agreeing?"

He shrugs.

"Though Janeway hours aren't especially short hours, it'll at least be a standard schedule. Headquarters has amazing child care facilities." He pauses, adding, "I'm also rather certain that I've already committed to memory all of the boss' pet peeves."

He finishes his statement with a smile, but Janeway can tell it's forced and looks at him with concern. He's right about the advantages of an HQ job, but it isn't like Tom to be drawn to desk work. His interest in the entire conversation has been half-hearted.

Everything about him today seems half-hearted.

"Are you sure?"

Over his coffee mug, he looks at her with a wry expression.

"No offense, Admiral. But first you offer me a job, and now you seem upset that I'm taking it. If the offer really stands, I accept. But if you'd rather have someone else in the position. . ."

She shakes her head and he looks at her questioningly.

"I honestly didn't expect you to agree." She squints. "I thought I was going to have to fight you."

He chuckles, but the sound is somehow devoid of genuine amusement.

"No fighting necessary." He puts down his mug. "I long ago decided it saves everyone a lot of time if I just give you whatever it is that you want."

The comment isn't a jab, she knows, but something about it stirs the concern that's already churning within her. She doesn't engage whatever is troubling him directly though. She, too, has learned to save time over the years.

"Let's see if you feel that way once you work for me."

"I've already worked for you for seven years. I suspect there won't be many surprises."

She smirks at this.

"Ah, yes. But now, you see, I have new-found privileges of rank to lord over you."

For the first time since they sat down, he meets her gaze in a serious way. He searches her face, and she looks at him with expectation and masked discomfort.

"Is that how you feel now. . . privileged?"

His tone is free of rancor or judgment and, looking into his eyes, she sees only sympathy. A reflection of her own concern.

"No," she admits in a low voice, resting her chin on her hand. "But I'm trying."

Across from her, he exhales heavily.

"Me, too."


	2. In the silence

**Chapter 2: In the silence**

When Tom shows up for his first day of work, she's surprised to realize that he has only a vague idea of what Starfleet has assigned her to, or else what the day-to-day work will look like.

The fact that he has agreed, essentially blind, to take the job in her office doesn't flatter her. Rather, his lack of interest in his own professional life causes her previous concern to burrow a little deeper into her thoughts.

She won't address anything directly with him, of course. But later, alone in her office, or else when her mind wanders in meetings, she will replay conversations with him in her mind. She will wonder if, after everything, the life they've found waiting for them in the Alpha Quadrant is worth all the sacrifices they made in the Delta Quadrant. And despite herself, she will think of the quote he gave to the media during her trial, though she will never allow herself to replay it.

She will remember his words exactly; clearly picture the look in his eyes even when he cast them away from the imager.

The memory will both haunt and reassure her in equal measure.

She informs him that Command has assigned her, largely, to dealing with tactical preparedness, though several things have begun to float across her desk regarding the Federation's relations with the Romulans. It is a large compliment, being assigned to military operations despite that she was not present in the Alpha Quadrant during the war. Though Tom merely nods, she can see from the look on his face that he understands this.

She can see, too, that he appreciates the irony of it all. That Starfleet is willing to squander some measure of her tactical skill by holding her hostage in an office rather than allowing her in the field. But he doesn't voice any comment as she explains her work, as well as her typical schedule.

As she leads him around the chambers of her office, she introduces the several members of her staff.

Given the nature of what she will be working on, she has a larger staff than most Admirals, though almost all of the officers currently assigned to her are temporary fills. Even Tom's father has only two administrative assistants, and thus her six-person office, which Tom is now the head of, is large by HQ standards.

It will never cease to be strange to her, after caring for nearly one hundred and fifty souls, that her six person staff is considered 'large'.

"Only Admiral Nechayev has more people," Janeway notes, once they are alone in her private office.

Her tone is neutral, but Tom gives her a quick glance.

Nechayev's criticisms of Janeway were, by far, the most savage of the hearings. Even Owen Paris noted to his son that he was taken back by the brutality demonstrated by the flag officer whose own staff once christened her 'the Deep Freeze.'

But Tom, having previously harbored a profound dislike of Nechayev, isn't particularly surprised by the Admiral's treatment of Janeway.

Nechayev's feelings on the Maquis have been well-documented, and he can only imagine the bristling outrage the full Admiral must feel that Janeway accepted the Maquis as members of her crew; that she made one of them her First Officer and confidant; that she sided with them over the institution that her own family has been steeped in for generations.

He can only imagine, as well, how Janeway must feel in meetings with the full admiralty, sitting across from Nechayev and the other Admirals who tore apart her decisions on _Voyager_ millimeter by millimeter. He can practically see Janeway's taught face when she looks at them. The polite smile that is subtly belied by the accusation lurking in her grey eyes.

He is all to familiar with that polite smile, as well as that phantom of accusation, and he thinks it infinitely worse than an open glare.

After a moment, Tom is drawn away from his thoughts by the sound of Janeway's voice.

"Admiral Nechayev may have mentioned that particular fact when she stopped by to welcome me to my new office."

Settling behind her desk, Janeway allows herself a rueful smile, and Tom lets out a small laugh. The idea of Nechayev engaging in not-so-subtle one-upmanship about something as basic as staff size darkly amuses him.

"Did she bring you a welcome basket when she came by? Perhaps a nice plate of cookies?"

The smile is already gone from her mouth, but he can see it briefly fight to reassert itself when he asks this with feigned innocence.

"No," Janeway replies, seemingly serious. "But she did bring me that Russian orchid."

The plant Janeway vaguely gestures to is on a small table in the corner of the office, rather than on the long mantel by her window. Deprived of light, it will produce no new blooms, and its stalk has already begun to bend.

"Perhaps you should have it tested for toxins," he quips, his eyes on the plant that will no doubt die in a matter of weeks.

She makes a non-committal noise in the back of her throat. His joke is just enough past the line of appropriateness that she won't allow herself to agree with it openly. At least, here, on HQ grounds.

This is a boundary of hers with which Tom is well acquainted, but one he always feels compelled to test nonetheless.

His face softens, and he looks at the orchid with an emotion she can't make out.

"Whenever it dies, I'll replicate some blue phlox to replace it."

Neither of their faces registers any change at his statement, though out of the corner of his eye he can see her looking at him over the rim of her coffee cup.

Janeway once commented to him, alone on the Delta Flyer, that she's always had a fondness for the blue flower that grows rampant in the wooded areas of Indiana. It was one casual remark among thousands in the seven years they spent serving together, and not the kind of thing one would expect someone to remember.

"Phlox sounds lovely," she says in passing, before turning her attention to a report. He exits her office to the attend to the work that is already waiting for him on his desk.

. . . . .

When Janeway is summoned to an emergency meeting halfway through Paris' first day, she looks at him with a faint trace of concern.

"I'm relatively certain that if I managed to fly your ship while people were shooting at us, I can hold down things in your office for an hour."

His tone isn't accusing or wounded, and he fails to look up from the strategy report he's reading when he speaks. Pursing her lips, she considers saying something, but instead zips her uniform jacket and nods to her administrative assistant on her way out.

When she returns two hours later, she returns to find a hot cup of coffee on her desk, the reports she needs to read organized by priority, and her administrative assistant- a chatty, young Bolian man- slower than usual in inundating her with the messages that have piled up in her absence.

When she looks at Tom, he nods briefly at her before returning to the report he's reading, giving every appearance that this is how he has remained the entire time she was away. She stares at him for only a moment before striding in her office, where she must deal with both the reports and, unfortunately, the messages.

Hours later, Janeway emerges from her office to find the rest of the staff gone, save Tom.

"There will be plenty of late nights, Mister Paris. You should go and fetch Miral."

Her tone sounds more like she's making a suggestion, but she means it more as an order. He glances at her briefly over his PADD.

"Miral's off-world with B'Elanna today. They're visiting B'Elanna's father while she has the day off."

His tone is casual and perhaps invites conversation, but she doesn't pick up the thread of discussion. As much as she cares about Tom's family and her god-daughter, she never knows how to go about these conversations with her former crew. She has spent too long as their commanding officer, and now she has no clue how to speak to them as anything other than that without sounding stilted or fumbling.

She has tried more times with Tom than with anyone else over the years, but with impressively little success.

"And so, in my god-daughter's absence, you're going to bury yourself in work?"

He doesn't think to comment on the fact that the entire time he's known the woman in front of him, she's buried herself in work. Instead, he smiles slightly as he continues to scan his reading.

"In your god-daughter's absence, I'm going to get myself as far ahead as I can on things here. And then I'm going to go home, and get as far ahead as I can on sleep."

His comment elicits a smile from her, though her posture indicates she is still waiting for him to put away his work and get up from his desk.

"If you're going home, I can lock up. I do have the codes now, you know."

He knows for a fact that she had no intention of calling it quits when she came out of her office, likely coming out only to get a PADD or perhaps stretch her legs before hunkering down again. He also knows that she won't order him to go home when she herself is staying behind.

He isn't intentionally throwing down a gauntlet, though he realizes afterward she may take it that way. She gauges as much, eyeing him with resolve rather than anger.

"Alright, Commander. We both put in another hour, and then we knock off."

The title throws him for a moment, as he's yet to adjust to his new rank of Lieutenant Commander. Every time he hears someone, especially Janeway, address him with the abbreviated 'Commander', he almost looks around for Chakotay. But after a brief pause, he clues in.

"Yes, ma'am."

An hour and a half later, Janeway emerges from her office again, though she's obviously reluctant to leave. She gives Tom a pinched expression, and he ignores it, standing to gather his things. The pile of PADDs he's taking home with him rivals hers, almost, but she makes no comment as he assembles them in his case.

"Ready?" she asks.

"Whenever you are."

They walk to the Trans-Francisco station together, and her face lights up in surprise when he gets in line behind her for the transport to the Richmond District.

"You didn't tell me you were living in the Richmond District," she says, and he looks at her quizzically.

He has been to her apartment once, when she had a party to celebrate the commissions of the former Maquis, three months earlier. Still, he isn't sure why she thinks he should have informed her that the apartment he's taken is in the same neighborhood as hers.

"B'Elanna likes the idea of all the parks."

A small frown threatens at the corner of his mouth, and Janeway notices it, filing the observation away.

"Are you staying in the new high-rise?" she asks, referring to the new Starfleet housing unit on Clement Street.

"No," he replies, shaking his head, "the Archer complex."

The Archer Residential Complex is a sprawling development just south of Mountain Lake Park. The units are smaller than the ones boasted by the new high-rise, but his apartment has a balcony and a mid-century feel that Tom appreciates.

In the evening, he often sits with Miral on his lap, and her pudgy fingers reach for moths while he watches older children play down below.

"You should come over for dinner some time," he adds, though she suspects the invitation is merely perfunctory.

"Yes, sometime soon," she says, as they move up in the line.

The frown on his face seems to deepen, and she allows herself to look at him. When he looks back at her, it's with something akin to frustration.

"Really. You should come over. Maybe the next time B'Elanna has the day off. It will be nice for you to see her and Miral." He pauses. "It will be nice for me, too."

She gives him a genuine smile as they board the transport, and he smiles back, both quiet in their contentment.

. . . . .

It's two and a half weeks before B'Elanna has another day off, but when she does, Tom once more extends the invitation of dinner.

Again, the rest of staff has gone home except for him. But this time, he has Miral on his lap, as he has just fetched her from child care, B'Elanna having deposited her there a few hours earlier when she had to run errands.

"You don't even have to eat. You can just drink coffee. And I'll tell B'Elanna she's not allowed to glare at you when you do."

Standing at the threshold of his office, Janeway snorts, but her put-off expression changes swiftly into a soft one as he watches Tom with his child.

Though Miral is only six months old, the Klingon side of her heritage has promised speedy growth, and she is already roughly equivalent to a human ten-month-old human in size and development. Currently, she reaches for everything on Tom's desk as her father looks on with a mixture of disapproval and affection.

"It's her first day off in two weeks, Tom. The two of you will want to spend some time alone together. Not to mention the hassle of having another person for dinner."

When she says this, his face becomes more disapproving, but it isn't clear if it's at her sentiment or his child, who has just pushed a PADD to the floor.

"It's hardly hassle to replicate a cup of coffee," he retorts, eliciting a glare that he goes ignored. "And she'd like to see you. We'll have plenty of time together when you're gone."

Janeway doesn't respond to this last comment, as it's obviously untrue.

It's already 18:00, and B'Elanna's morning transport to Mars will leave the next day at 07:00 . His work day has consumed much of her day off , and if Janeway stays any length of time with them this evening, the couple will have exactly the same amount of time alone together as they have everyday that B'Elanna works, making it back to San Francisco well after 20:00.

She tries not to contemplate what it means that Tom is trying to fill B'Elanna's day off with a dinner a guest, focusing instead on how nice it would see her former Chief Engineer.

B'Elanna sometimes comes to HQ grounds with Tom, but she only stays long enough to accompany Tom and Miral to the daycare center, kissing her husband goodbye just outside the building his office is housed in. Once, when B'Elanna was leaving, she and Janeway crossed paths, but B'Elanna was running late for her transport, and their conversation, though pleasant, had to be kept short.

"Your aunt Kathryn is silly," he says to the girl, and Miral let's out a gurgled laugh at the animated face he makes.

Though Janeway has now invited Tom twice to call her by her first name when they're alone, this is the first time he's actually used it.

Looking at father and child, she smiles.

"Well, we should get going if we're going to make it to dinner."

He nods at her words, moving Miral to his hip as he stands.

. . . . . .

Janeway is surprised when B'Elanna greets her with a smile and even a hug at the apartment, but she's also relieved when there seems to be no trace of discord between the couple afterward.

"Admiral, it's so good to see you," B'Elanna says, pulling away after their brief embrace.

"It's Kathryn now, B'Elanna. And it's good to see you, too."

Coming in behind Janeway, Tom kisses his wife, who in turn takes the baby from him.

"I think we're officially in a tantrum stage," Tom calls, when B'Elanna moves into the living room to settle Miral.

"Oh?"

"She apparently cried for an hour when you dropped her off. They had just gotten her settled down when I popped my head in."

Tom shakes his head, his tone bespeaking his annoyance with himself.

"It started the whole cycle over again."

B'Elanna gives Tom a sympathetic look, regarding him over the couch that partitions the living room.

"You had no way of knowing. Besides," she says, brushing a strand of hair from her face, "it's not as though her moods these days are tranquil."

Tom only makes a frustrated sound in reply, but Janeway watches the whole exchange with interest.

Tom never mentioned to her that Miral was having trouble in daycare, though he did look a bit frazzled whenever he came back from a meeting in another building that afternoon. She'd assumed that the debriefing he attended had gotten to him; Admiral Hayes is anything but short-winded, and she suspects, too, that Tom is still holding a grudge about Hayes' role in her trial.

Still, she didn't think to ask, and when he immediately dove back into the work on his desk, she forgot all about it.

As the three of them sit around the dinner table, the topic of conversation quickly moves to B'Elanna's work on Utopia Planitia, as well as the latest designs for the new scout-class ships that Starfleet will be rolling out in a year.

"It's really amazing," B'Elanna remarks, gesturing animatedly, "the whole engine room could fit on _Voyager_'s bridge."

Kathryn is about to respond when Miral knocks her cup to the ground with force.

Tom leans over to pick it up , straightening afterward with a firm expression. His child, it appears, does not appreciate his reproach. She looks at him with red, angry cheeks and eyes that are threatening to cry.

"Did your mother tell you I'm a sucker for an angry look and forehead ridges?"

Tom's voice indicates suspicion. Beside Kathryn, B'Elanna snorts.

"Because I'm pretty sure that was supposed to be a secret."

Miral seems somehow pacified by his soft tone and mischievous eyes. She plays with her cup contentedly, though it's clear she still contemplates throwing it to the ground.

Looking at Tom, Kathryn feels abruptly guilty. She and B'Elanna have been going about the latter's work for twenty minutes, and Tom has mostly sat silent. Coming here, to their home, she'd expected the exact opposite, and even planned topics of conversation to draw B'Elanna out. She isn't sure what to make of the fact that the man she's worked side-by-side with for the last three weeks has quickly demurred into the background of her visit.

Suddenly, she looks back at B'Elanna.

"You know, I could take her for a few hours. You two could go out- salvage the night without your former CO hanging around."

At this last part, Tom shoots Kathryn a wry look, but it's clear otherwise that he's intrigued by her offer. He's look at his wife questioningly, and she, in turn, looks at Janeway with the same expression.

"We wouldn't want to put you out. . . As you've no doubt noticed, she's a bit of a handful these days."

Janeway smiles.

"I dealt with Tom for seven long years and, throughout that time, he had Harry Kim to cover for him. I'm pretty sure I can handle Miral alone for a few hours."

Tom rises from the table as to indicate the decision has been made, but when he picks up Janeway's plate, he smirks slightly.

"Just be careful, Kathryn. She has half my genetics, after all."

To punctuate the sentiment, Miral again tosses her cup to the floor, this time with more force. The child let's out a delighted cry at the loud clatter she's produced, and Janeway looks at Paris with a smirk of her own.

"Don't I know it."

. . . . . .

Three weeks after Janeway has dinner with Tom and B'Elanna, and six weeks since Tom has begun work at her office, a media outlet does an exposé on the life and career of Thomas Eugene Paris. The outlet has been doing a feature on a member of _Voyager_'s crew each week for the last three months, but for some reason, it takes them this long to get around to the ship's helmsman.

Tom silently hopes that his delayed profile indicates a lack of interest. B'Elanna guesses out loud, sitting next to him in their living room, that they have been holding back his exposé to keep people watching. Tom winces when his wife proves correct.

The piece spends a painfully long time on the Monean incident and his resulting demotion. And the fact that it makes him out to be a hero more than a jackass makes Tom feel even worse about it. After three years, he still hasn't decided if he regrets his actions on the water world. But he knows, either way, that praising what he did is inappropriate. Perhaps even laughable.

To make matters worse, the outlet plays Janeway's personal logs as a partial voice-over to the events, and Tom cringes when he hears the familiar gravelly sound as images of him flash across the console.

Janeway's logs had leaked months earlier, and Tom and the rest of the ship's former crew have all privately decided that if they ever get a hold of the lowly administrator who leaked them, they'll personally kill him with their bare hands. Beneath this anger, however, Tom entertains the suspicion that the Ensign in question was acting on behalf of someone else. Perhaps someone with a bar pinned to their collar. In his better moments, he pushes this last thought a way, thinking it the product of a mind that has grown too cynical, even for San Francisco.

Janeway's logs from the incident are pointed and demonstrate, with aching clarity, her raw sense of rage and betrayal at the time.

The media runs her harshest comment alongside Tom's quote from her trial. The painful counterpoint of criticism and devotion is breathtaking, and like Tom's original quote, plays on loop ad nauseum.

When Tom walks into the office the first day after the outlet airs the piece, his footsteps are heavy and everything about the way he moves betrays his blinding anger. He throws his satchel down with force on his desk, stalking to the replicator to obtain a much-needed cup of coffee. The staff is relieved when the Lieutenant Commander does not take out his frustration on them. Instead, he speaks to them in soft tones and regards them with kind expressions as he goes about his morning. The object of his anger is located far, though perhaps not all that far, from their offices, and once inside the sphere of work, he attempts to will the negative thoughts away.

They are not so lucky with the Admiral.

Largely, she secludes herself in her office. But when she does come out, she bristles at all who speak to her, save the Lieutenant Commander, who she avoids looking at altogether. When she herself is forced to speak, she barks orders in a harsh tone and gives steely glares. After she returns to the confines of her inner office, Paris can practically hear her Bolian assistant sigh with relief. Paris gives the man a sympathetic smile but says nothing before heading into his own office.

By lunch time, her temper has died to a slow simmer, but her mood is still dark and festering. Paris' demeanor becomes contemplative, a pensive expression replacing his previous one.

He recognizes Janeway's behavior all too well from the Void and other periods. He surmises that what consumes her now isn't the same outrage that has followed him on the transport from his apartment, clinging to him like the damp San Francisco air as he navigated the narrow HQ pathways into his office.

No, he thinks. It isn't anger at all. It's guilt.

Unfortunately, guilt on Janeway looks remarkably like anger, and also proves a conduit for the more fiery emotion. Tom suspects, looking at her behind her desk, that she if goes into the afternoon's long meeting with full admiralty like this, she's going to snap. The carefully constructed dam she has engineered since coming to Headquarters will break under the weight of her mood, and she will let loose her anger on the icy Nechayev, or perhaps Hayes, with his long, bloated comments. All while Tom's father, as well as Admiral Sulu and other brass of the more compassionate ilk, are helpless to stop her.

Failing the derailment of her present mood, Tom, along with the admiralty and all their staffs, will watch as the fury of Kathryn Janeway is finally unleashed.

Or so Tom imagines, looking at her taught face and pursed lips.

"Hi," he says, leaning in her doorway.

She doesn't respond to him, naturally, but he still presses forward.

"I just got a call from Security. . . Something about a ravenous monster terrorizing offices, storming through rooms. . . Yelling at innocent staff."

His tone and expression could be listed next to angelic in the dictionary, and he waits a few beats before continuing.

"You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

She looks up at him with a frown on her face, but quickly the frown is replaced with a glare.

"I don't have time for this right now, Commander."

He knows from the use of his rank more than anything that she wants to yell at him, and he thinks this is progress.

It isn't that he wants to court her anger, exactly. It's just that anger toward him is infinitely better than anger toward other people, be those people their shared staff, or the brass he and Janeway are going to have to see later.

Her anger toward him he can take. Anger toward him he's intimately acquainted with, as it has been his companion for seven long years.

"Come with me for lunch," he says, changing tactics, and she looks at him with open suspicion.

"I'm not particularly hungry, Tom."

"Me either," he concedes. "Maybe we can just walk."

"Walk," she repeats, as though she's never heard the verb before.

He doesn't reply, standing with his arms crossed in her doorway as though he has no plan to move anytime soon.

She rises with reluctance, and he successfully represses a smile. When they exit the outer office together, he can feel the collective relief of the staff behind them.

"They hate me, don't they?" she asks, when they are several meters away from the building.

He doesn't look at her. He can tell from the tone she's using what her expression must be, and he has no desire to see the look for himself.

"They don't know you," he offers, and when she shoots him a pointed glance he acknowledges, "they haven't exactly seen you in the best of times."

His honesty seems to mollify her, and as they stroll the grounds, her expression loses its hard edge.

They wind their way through the back grounds of the campus in silence, tracing much of the same path they walked the second day of her trial.

Eventually, they enter the child care facilities, and Tom nods to members of the staff as he and Janeway take up a corner of the observation room. Through the window, they can see Miral deep in her nap, her dark form a contrast to the children on either side of her.

She doesn't move in her sleep, or even sigh. She is deep in the slumber of the contented, her passing tantrums and aggravations having slipped away from her the moment her tiny body hit the pad.

"When I look at her, it's difficult not see her as a reflection of myself."

Tom's voice jars Kathryn from her thoughts, and she looks at him with interest.

"She _is _a reflection of you, Tom. She's your daughter, she's part of you."

"True. But she's also her own person. She's more than just an amalgamation of B'Elanna and I. Our hopes, our fears."

His fingers trace the glass as he speaks, and Kathryn watches him wistfully.

In the six weeks that Tom has been in her office, she has gone through various stages of honesty with herself about why she wanted him with her.

At first, she told herself she was simply concerned about him, but that self-deception was quick to give way, even on a good day. In so many other aspects of their relationship, she is quick to gloss over his ailments, his discomforts. Why choose then to build her entire office around his passing melancholy?

She told herself, too, that she simply wanted someone familiar around. Someone from _Voyager. _And Tom, having been without a job, had been the perfect solution.

Most days, the second explanation, bolstered by the first, seemed to hold water. But this morning, she'd heard the leaking sound all the way in her office. And by mid-day, she was up to her knees in doubts.

The truth was, choosing Tom to be by her side was a kind of punishment; a private self-castigation she'd sunk herself into, and with a zeal she has no interest in examining. The guilt that eluded her at the time of her trial, forestalled in part by anger, had finally found her before her promotion was made official. Its cold presence settling deep in her chest at the same time the bar was pinned to her collar.

Inviting Tom here, she was forcing herself, day after day, to be reminded of her failings as commanding officer as well as a person. The stinging sense of failure only made worse by the ghost of emotions reflecting in Tom's eyes. The irony that never, ever among them was there one of accusation.

It had been excruciating to have it all laid bare for public consumption; the sound of her own voice, followed by Tom's now familiar words, stripping away any remnant of self-pretense. And though her displeasure and anger had been inward, it had exploded outward, as it always did, when she didn't know how to handle the regrets that teemed within her.

Yet another mistake, she thinks, contemplating the self-perpetuation of the stream.

"What is you see when you look at me, Admiral?"

She doesn't respond to him at first because she's consumed in thought. But once his questions finds her, she still remains silent, fearing, correctly, that he already knows the answer.

He lets out a harsh sigh, and the sound seems to encapsulate their relationship perfectly. The uncomfortable silence that stretches between them despite all the things the two of them understand about each other. The way they manage to bring out the worst in each other as much as they bring out the best. The guilt; the frustration; the regret and disappointment.

The unspoken words that, if laid end to end, would stretch to Earth's moon and back.

She searches for words, desperate to keep this conversation from collapsing, but Tom beats her to the punch.

"You know why I took this job, don't you?"

She looks at him quizzically, genuinely puzzled about the direction their conversation is turning.

"You wanted to be in San Francisco."

He regards her with patience, as though she's Seven of Nine and he's trying to restrain himself from highlighting an obvious social gaffe.

"There are lots of jobs in San Francisco. But I took this one as soon as you offered it."

There are a million reasons why Tom could have taken his job, and many of them sound. But the look on his face- his rueful expression and regretful eyes- betrays everything, and she suddenly sees it plain as day.

He took this job to be near her. Or at least, who she represents to him. The officer who was his father's protégé and lived up to all the expectations he failed to in his youth; the Captain who demoted him and tossed him in the brig; the woman who looked at him disappointment and approval in alternating waves.

It isn't just her who's torturing herself, Kathryn realizes. Tom is, too, and she's the rack.

Closing her eyes, she rakes her hand through her hair, emotions pouring through her like water under the Golden Gate.

When she finally looks at him, he's watching his daughter again, and his expression is soft and far away. She puts a hand on his arm and he smiles, though only briefly.

"I hope, one day, there's more between us than silence and the shadow of our own failures."

He manages to sound more hopeful than melancholy, and, beside him, she nods, her eyes following his to the tiny form who has no clue about disappointment or guilt; who demonstrates her needs forcefully, without any sense of embarrassment.

She tilts her face forward until her forehead is pressed against the pane, her hushed voice distorted by the proximity of the glass.

"Me, too."


	3. Growth and decay

**Chapter 3: Growth and decay**

The decline of Tom and B'Elanna's marriage is steady, if not especially dramatic.

Kathryn watches as the tell-tale frown appears more and more often. After four months in her office, it becomes a permanent fixture on his face each morning that he walks in, carrying his sorrow with him as he does his satchel; setting it down once inside the office, only to pick it up again when he leaves for the day.

Eventually, the frown will disappear completely, replaced by an expressionless face.

B'Elanna still accompanies her husband to campus some mornings, though she does so less and less. The pain between them isn't obvious, but the few times Janeway sees them together, the silence stretches on in a way that is painfully familiar to her.

The one obvious display Janeway witnesses occurs five months after Tom comes to work for her, when she enters the outer office to find it quiet except for Tom's voice. She isn't surprised he has beat her to the office, but she's curious that he's meeting anyone at this hour, whether in person or over comm link.

Making her way to her own office, she knows she will find out soon enough. She has to walk through Tom's office to get to hers, a design feature that she finds as regrettable as she does comforting. The layout shields her from their staff as well as what lies beyond, but it also leaves Tom with little privacy. She has decided several times to contact the appropriate office and have the layout modified, but she never seems to get around to it.

This morning, walking in on Tom and B'Elanna, she regrets, with acute pain, her procrastination.

They aren't arguing, exactly. But as Janeway strides through Paris' door, he's just finished saying something, his eyes pleading and his posture indicating exhaustion as much it does despair. B'Elanna shakes her head furiously at whatever he says, though tears are streaming down her face and her red eyes betray that she has been crying for sometime.

Though surprised by the scene in the Commander's office, the Admiral doesn't hesitate or slow. Nodding to both of them, she ducks her head and goes straight for her door, catching sight only of Tom's clenching jaw before the entrance hisses shut behind her. Shortly afterward, she hears the sound of the outer office door as B'Elanna departs, and half an hour later, she hears it again, signaling the arrival of their staff.

As the main office springs to life with sounds of work, Janeway barricades herself behind her desk, noting, with mixed emotions, that Tom does not appear at her doorway to interrupt her self-imposed isolation.

When she pokes her head into his office just before their mid-day meeting on the other side of the Headquarters, he's up to his waist in applications for the positions that are coming open in their office. The six-month period of the temporary assignments end in just two weeks, and they have been flooded with more interest in the open positions than either of them could ever have anticipated.

Three out of the five staff members are temporary fills, but Janeway wasn't particularly surprised when the remaining two officers submitted their resignations in favor of others assignments, making Tom's the only slot that won't be coming open.

She briefly considers taking each of the two staff members aside privately and asking them to stay, but she dismisses the thought out of hand. They will refuse to admit that their opinion of her has had any effect on their decision, and even then, they will be slow to change their minds about her.

When she informed Tom the previous week that she would let the two of them go without comment, she could tell by the look on his face that he was relieved. She wondered, then, how many moody looks or muttered comments he'd witnessed whenever she was absent. And abruptly, she wished that her current staff was departing the following day, rather than in three weeks.

Looking at him now, there is no trace of the scene she witnessed this morning. His eyes are focused on the work in front of him, his chin propped up by one arm as he scans personnel files.

"Ready?" she asks, in a tone that's the closest thing she can come to cheery.

In font of her, his focused expression morphs into relief.

"Yes," he says emphatically, pushing away the files with haste.

Coming into his office, she chuckles. She knows he enjoys the process of hiring staff members as much she does. Which is to say, about as much she liked listening to _Voyager_'s EMH lecture her about her sleep habits, or accepting, with a forced smile, whatever concoction Neelix had come up with for dinner.

"Let's get out of here before anyone else who would like to work for the illustrious Admiral Janeway sends me their file."

At the word 'illustrious,' she cringes slightly, but other than that makes no reply, following him out of the office and into the warm air that characterizes fall in San Francisco.

Halfway to their destination, she turns to him with an expression of discomfort, and he fears she's going to remark on what she witnessed that morning.

"I've been thinking about the candidates for Mister Ul's position."

Beside her, Tom stops mid-stride.

"You want to replace Zim?"

His tone conveys his complete horror, but she isn't sure she understands the depth of his feeling.

Though her Bolian assistant has put in for a permanent position in her office- the only one of her temporary staff to do so- she doesn't think he's a very good fit for either herself or the Commander. He's too chatty. Slow to recognize boundaries. Once, he even brought in a Bolian 'delicacy' of partially-decayed meat, cheerily offering some to everyone in the office, including his commanding officers.

Everyone within ten meters paled, though Tom was unfailingly polite when he demurred

Kathryn looks at him with a searching expression before something dawns on her.

"You like him?"

She speaks the question with something between confusion and disapproval. Looking at her, Tom scratches his neck, a small smile appearing on his face.

"I guess he reminds me of someone."

"Like who?"

At her complete mystification, Tom bites his lip in order to contain his amusement.

"I'll give you a hint: he has orange eyes, brown spots, and you used to yell at him frequently about your coffee."

Understanding hits her, followed immediately by embarrassment. And then, finally, guilt.

"Neelix," she breathes, the flush of embarrassment making it all the way to her neck.

This time, Tom laughs out loud, patting his CO on the back as she shakes her head.

"I promise not to tell our Talaxian friend."

Walking side by side, Janeway's embarrassment eventually gives way, the growing amusement that radiates from Paris overtaking her own sense of guilt.

"So," she drawls, as they approach their destination, "Zim stays."

Activating the door's sensors, he stops to allow her in first.

"Zim stays," he echoes, favoring her with a toothy grin.

. . . . .

Two days later, she finally plucks up the courage to ask him about B'Elanna, though she does it in a roundabout way and when they have run out of their usual small talk.

They're in the middle of a campus-wide lockdown, the second so far this month. Drills of this kind have increased in frequency since the incident three months earlier, when an unstable Bajoran man who'd lost both his sons in the war made it onto grounds with a compression rifle, and several meters past security before being subdued with fatal force.

"It could be worse," Tom had said to her an hour earlier, after she'd emitted a frustrated sound when her office door locked behind them.

His rueful expression communicated a multitude of less desirable scenarios, including being locked down again, as they both were during the security breech, in a meeting with Nechayev and her staff.

Or else, being trapped in the outer office, with their own staff, whom Janeway now largely ignores, with the marked exception of her Bolian assistant.

She knew Tom was right, of course. At least in her private office, unlike his, they have a window and a couch, as well as each other for company.

Nothing changed immediately following their exchange in HQ's child care facility. But gradually, over a period of weeks and then months, the nature of their silence has shifted. A fair share of things still go unspoken between them, but more often than not, they are the wordless exchanges of people who know each other well, rather than a quiet that bespeaks darker thoughts.

As Tom's marriage has decayed, Janeway's relationship with him has grown, though neither process causes the other.

Day by day, she comes to depend on him more professionally, relying on him to handle their staff and watching with interest as he learns to navigate the backchannels of their present environment. Tom is trustworthy person, but he's also a charmer, and it's no time at all before he's ushered into the confidences of other flag officer's staff members.

She observes him at lunch sometimes, sitting in the large lounge in the main complex.

Most days, they pass lunch together, whether sitting in her office over tea or walking the grounds they've now navigated countless times. On the rare occasions they venture to the main complex, however, Tom quits her side the moment they enter the rows of tables and swarms of people around them.

Janeway knows not to be hurt by it. It isn't that he wants to get away from her. He just realizes that mingling with people and building relationships is an important part of his job; that it will make both of professional lives infinitely easier. Sitting across from Owen Paris months earlier, she remarked on Tom's abilities, watching her mentor's son with barely contained amusement.

"If ever we held a popularity contest, I'm pretty sure he'd win."

Owen had only looked at her with a mixture of confusion and dismissal. The older Paris, though having grown kinder in his old age, was never good with people. He didn't care about popularity, and even if he had, he would have no idea how to accrue it.

This particular trait rubbed off on Janeway in her formative years. And watching his aged face and familiar blue eyes, she wondered how many of his mistakes she'd duplicated. Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Tom's laughter, members of Admiral Sulu's staff looking on as their bar-clad boss stopped by to tease Janeway's chief of staff in passing.

"Don't you dare make them late," Mitsu Sulu called to Tom, her laughter, melodious and light, trailing behind her as she walked away.

Janeway hadn't been sure to envy more: Tom for his ease and natural ability with people, or Mitsu for never seeming to find her last name- easily as famous as Janeway or Paris- a burden. Glancing back at Owen, his eyes watching his son with emotions she knew all too well, she decided it was better not to think about it.

Looking at Tom now on the couch in her office, she tries to summon either her current companion's ease or her female colleague's grace.

"How are you?" she asks, her simple question embodied with a deeper meaning by her tone of voice and searching expression.

Tom doesn't reply to her immediately, and she fears, in the pause that comes before he speaks, that he's going to shut her out. Instead, he lets out a heavy breath as he sinks a little further into the couch.

"B'Elanna and I have decided that she's going to stay on Mars part of the time," he responds, the familiar frown appearing.

She schools her features as he goes on to explain that his wife will now remain on Utopia Planitia four days out of the week, and that two of those she'll take their daughter with her. The new arrangement will save B'Elanna hours in a week in travel, and will minimize the amount of time that either of them are away from their daughter.

He doesn't acknowledge with his words that it will also mean that the majority of the couple's time will now be spent separately. But the desolation that sets in on his face, a rare occurrence when it comes to talking about his marriage, does that for him.

"It's going to be an adjustment," Kathryn says, realizing that it's a laughable understatement, but not knowing how else to reply. "But I'm sure her current schedule has her exhausted."

She expects him to reply, with resignation or even bitterness, that B'Elanna isn't the only who's tired. But he just nods solemnly before closing his eyes.

He won't betray his wife's trust, despite the waning of their marriage. And he especially won't betray it by announcing her failures to a woman whose respect and trust B'Elanna fought hard to earn over seven years. He knows too well what it felt like for her to burden Janeway's estimating looks and barely-concealed misgivings, and he won't undue her years of progress. Even if confiding in the woman next to him would provide him with desperately needed comfort.

"B'Elanna thinks it will be easier," he remarks, after a moment.

Beside him, Kathryn tallies the number of times Tom has said things like this to her.

_B'Elanna thinks- _

_B'Elanna wants- _

_B'Elanna says-_

As they've mounted in occurrence, Kathryn has come to understand the meaning behind them better. Tom isn't just trying to humor his wife. He's genuinely trying to make her happy. He just doesn't know how, and so he goes along, however painfully, with what she thinks or wants.

The problem is, B'Elanna doesn't know how to make herself happy either, and the reality of being back in the Alpha Quadrant with a thousand options and a family to keep together has worsened her choices, rather than bettering them. She's insisted that they live on Earth though her work is on Mars. Insisted that they live in San Francisco, though her husband's best prospects for work were elsewhere.

And Tom has laid in a parallel course to whatever B'Elanna decides, regardless of his own needs, or the fact that her heading is hurdling them toward destruction. By the time either of them realize it, it will be too late. He will reverse direction, only to watch helplessly as she barrels on without him, her panic increasing her speed as the space between them grows exponentially.

And in the meantime, all Kathryn can do is stand back as the couple's tragic descent enfolds.

Looking at his sagging body and pained face, Kathryn feels sorry for him, as well as for the engineer who's currently working herself to the bone in the fleet yard just above Mars.

"And what do you think?"

It's the same question she always tosses him, and with the same neutral tone.

His doesn't open his eyes to answer, but his voice betrays all the emotions that would swim there if he did.

"I honestly don't know what to think anymore, Kathryn."

She pats his arm softly, sinking further into the couch as he did moments earlier.

When Tom finally opens his eyes, he stares at the orchid across from him with unmasked contempt.

To their silent chagrin, the plant somehow clings to life, though it hasn't produced blooms in over six months and its stalk still bows noticeably. It remains suspended in the same sickly state Tom first encountered it in- unable to get better, but defiantly refusing to die.

"Are you watering it?"

His question sounds slightly suspicious, but the tone of Kathryn's speedy reply sounds decidedly offended. As though he has accused her of passing information onto the enemy, or conduct unbecoming an officer.

"No."

His only comment is a grunted "hmm."

But later in the day, she hears him ask Zim if he's been doing anything to the plant in the Admiral's office. Her assistant admits freely, and with a sad statement about the plant's appearance, that on the rare occasions he goes into the Admiral's office in her absence, he waters the ailing orchid.

Though Tom doesn't order the man to stop aiding the object of their hatred, Kathryn accurately pictures the displeased look on Tom's face when silence ensues, as well as the puzzled expression her assistant gives him when Tom's footsteps mark his retreat back into his office.

Behind her desk, she fails to suppress the smirk that slowly spreads across her lips, focusing again on the pile of work in front of her.

. . . . .

The next week, Janeway is forced to depart San Francisco for an emergency meeting on Betazed.

The afternoon before she leaves, she gives Tom the same faint expression of concern that she did his first day.

They're in the middle of making the final choices regarding staff, and Janeway's absence will fall during the time they've scheduled the last round of interviews. They've already whittled down to twelve the pile of applications that began at just over one hundred, and while their disagreement was never heated, they differed completely in their thoughts on candidates. Those who remain are a fifty-fifty mix of their preferences.

Tom had been sure, once the interviews are over, she would disqualify, for one reason or another, each and every applicant he has championed.

The thought that she cannot do so now, unless she is willing to stall the entire process, is an unending source of amusement to him.

"If you don't want me to choose officers without you, I can request a temporary stay of everyone's assignments."

He adopts the same tone he did in response to her concern almost six months earlier. But this time, a small smile plays at the corner of his mouth. It isn't clear whether his amusement is at her expense, or because the child he holds in his arms is refusing to let go of one of his pips.

In front of him, Janeway's eyes narrow, her hands moving to her hips.

"Did you somehow orchestrate this little political crisis on Betazed to get me out of the office, Thomas? Perhaps put in a personal call yourself to Lwaxana Troi?"

Despite her posture, he can tell by her tone that she's teasing him, the nature of the dig she's tossing his way making it all the more obvious.

Two weeks earlier, the aging Betazoid ambassador had spent two days at Headquarters, working largely with Admiral Sulu. Kathryn and Tom had met her by chance, when they stumbled into she and Sulu at lunch, coming into the main complex.

After introducing Janeway, Sulu had introduced Paris with a serene smile.

"And this is Lieutenant Commander Paris, Ambassador. Tom is Owen Paris' son."

Sulu could have said anything after Tom's name- perhaps introduced him as the fifth flying Andorian eel in a traveling carnival show. It would have garnered no reaction, as all Troi saw was the man's handsome face and piercing blue eyes.

"Pleased to meet you, Thomas," the Ambassador had said, her sultry tone one that Janeway or Sulu would be hard-pressed to use even in unofficial capacity.

Janeway had fought to repress any sign of shock, while Sulu's serene smile never faltered.

The appreciative look the Ambassador gave him made Tom's toes fidget in his shoes.

"Would you like Mister Paris to continue your tour of the new flight simulators?" Sulu asked, looking to the Troi expectantly.

Mitsu Sulu's delicate words had never sounded so cold to Paris. Or so incredibly inspired to Janeway.

"Perfect," the Ambassador had clapped, already breaking away from the group.

In the mere seconds that Tom remained where he stood, he shot Sulu a look of unmasked annoyance.

Sulu had continued to smile, while beside her, Janeway found herself unable to look at the man in front of her, for fear of laughing out loud.

"Come along, Thomas," Troi had called over her shoulder, before Commander had followed, giving one last glare to the two flag officers as he turned around.

After the Ambassador and her reluctant escort departed, Sulu and Janeway had walked back to the former's office, the latter's amusement growing with every step.

Looking at Janeway now, Paris tries to feign the frustration he felt then at being thrown under the proverbial shuttle.

"No," he says, putting force behind his words. "But thank you for reminding me that I still owe Admiral Sulu a heartfelt note of appreciating for the other week."

She rolls her eyes, plucking the pip out of his daughter's hand before handing it back to him wordlessly. She briefly considers making a joke as she does it, but dismisses the idea just as fast. She can't imagine either of them will ever find demotion jokes funny.

Tom, somehow, doesn't share her skepticism.

"Don't like me as a Lieutenant?" he quips, a knowing smile spreading across his face.

Despite herself, she smirks.

"I like you better as Lieutenant Commander, I think."

Before she continues, she gives him a long look as she sips the coffee in her hand.

"Especially now that you actually respond to the title when I use it."

As he shifts Miral in his lap, Tom smiles, an acknowledgment of the time it took him to get accustomed to his rank.

"How do you know I'm responding to the title at all? For all you know, I'm running on instinct. Fleeing from your glare. Jumping at the sound of your commands."

The joke could be dark, but he sounds genuinely cheerful when he makes it. The fact that he doesn't hesitate before saying this, or his previous joke, communicates more than anything else.

Watching Tom with his daughter, Kathryn feels relief. The ease they now have with one another has snuck up on her, and she has yet to stop and appreciate it fully. Seeing Tom unguarded like this, bantering with him freely, is something she thought she would never get to do.

Tom worries when she doesn't respond, lifting his gaze from his daughter to the spot where Kathryn stands. There's a soft expression on her face when he does so, and looking at her, he's able to roughly estimate her thoughts.

Smiling again, he tries to gently bring her back to the present.

"You know, when you get back, she's probably going to be as tall as I am."

Kathryn laughs at his exaggeration, regarding her god-daughter with a look of tempered amazement.

"Her rate of growth really is astounding," Kathryn agrees.

Tom can't help but find humor at how clinical she sounds. Like Miral is some kind of alien plant life she's investigating in a lab. Shaking his head, he laughs.

Choosing to sidestep whatever he's laughing at, Kathryn finds the original thread of their conversation, her face growing serious.

"You should do the interviews and make the final decisions without me. I trust you to do what's right for the office."

She says 'the office' rather than 'me' because there are only so many barriers she can let down, with Tom or anyone else.

Still, Tom understands, looking at her with the same soft expression she wore moments earlier.

"I won't let you down," he promises, after a moment, and looking at Miral rather than her.

"I know you won't," she responds, staring at the tiny fingers that once again reach for his pips.

Before they leave for the day, they sit in his office for sometime, both of them watching as his child gropes silently at her father's collar. Together, they each ponder the changes that have found them, as well those that remain just around the bend.


	4. The one you don't see coming

**Chapter 4: The one you don't see coming**

The assassination of Admiral Alynna Nechayev was as stunning to her as it was to onlookers.

Facing her officers when the blast struck her, the emotionless mask that rarely faltered immediately slipped from its place, usurped by a look of utter dismay.

Seconds after her body crumpled to the ground, her assassin was slain by Nechayev's forces. Firing the shot that had taken down the flag officer had required coming out into the open, and, thus, the knowing sacrifice of the assassin's own life.

As Paris watches Janeway fall to the ground through his scope, he can only imagine that there's a smirk on her face.

Turning to his father next to him, it is obvious the older man doesn't share his amusement. Though Janeway has taken down Nechayev, her own elimination means that Admiral Sulu's team, which both father and son are assigned to, now trails Nechayev's by twenty officers.

Not to mention that they have just lost their best tactician, having sacrificed herself in an amazing, if slightly questionable, display of bravado.

Beside Tom, Owen sharply exhales his disapproval, and the younger man fights to contain the laughter that would only magnify his father's anger.

The war games at Headquarters are a relic of pre-war policies. A profoundly unenlightening drill that was once the product of a certain kind of complaisance- the belief, despite all the Starfleet procedures and training, that San Francisco, and so Starfleet Headquarters, would not be directly besieged.

Despite the absence of the complaisance in post-war San Francisco, the annual HQ war games persist. And looking down at the battle field in front of him, only a dozen meters separating Janeway's prone form from Nechayev's, Tom can now see why.

Three weeks earlier, Janeway had poked her head into his office, per their usual routine, to probe for gossip on the upcoming drill.

"What can you tell me?" she'd asked, leaning against the table just inside his office.

She had, of course, been provided with appropriate information regarding the drills. But what she was looking for was the unofficial stuff. And the 'unofficial' stuff is what Tom, like most staff heads, specializes in, using his knowledge to amuse her as often as he does to aid her.

"Well," he said. "I hear from my father's staff that Command announces pretty much every year that they want this to be serious business."

He paused, and she waited, knowing it was for dramatic effect.

"And every year, the level of decorum remains the same. Which is to stay, about as low as that of the war games at the Academy."

Sitting down in the chair across from him, Janeway chuckled. She remembered, with rueful clarity, the things she herself did the four times she participated in the infamous Academy drill.

"Anything else?" she asked, cradling her coffee mug.

"The assignment of teams is done by rounds, recruitment being left up to the two squad leaders."

She nodded, signaling she already knew this.

"Apparently the decorum there is even worse; roughly resembling the picking of teams for parrisses squares."

This time she snorted, her coffee almost spilling out of her cup as she laughed.

"You know," she began, rising from her chair, "I was always picked first for teams in school."

Sifting through the PADDs on his desk, Paris' expression mirrored his CO's: smugness, with just a tinge of excitement.

"Me, too," he'd replied, not looking up to see the smirk on her face grow as she turned to go back to her desk.

The war games had thus far gone just as Tom had predicted. Nechayev and Sulu had been made squad leaders ("the epic battle of good and evil", Tom would later remark to Harry Kim, over comm link), and he and Janeway had, in fact, been chosen by Sulu in the first round of assignments.

Walking down the main path that bisects the HQ campus, Tom can still feel the frustration radiating from his father. It is one that is directed, obviously, at the woman that is walking on the other side of the younger Paris.

Their team were declared the winners in their war game, but it was an eked out victory that came after both teams were almost totally annihilated. With the demise of Nechayev, her troops had faltered, quickly losing their edge in terms of numbers. But the loss of Janeway had, too, been crippling, and Sulu's team had been forced to sacrifice even more troops in two brutal, offensive maneuvers.

Walking toward their respective offices, they are, all three of them, members of the fallen.

When Admiral Paris quits his son's side at the fork in the path, he doesn't nod to or even look at the pair before he stalks away. As his father's form retreats from view, Tom hazards a glance at Kathryn. Her features are set defiantly, and there isn't a trace of remorse anywhere to be found.

Stealing himself as they continue on the path and enter their building, Paris nods to Zim as they pass him, trailing Janeway as she enters his office and, then, finally, hers.

As soon as her door closes behind them, he dissolves into laughter, the mirth that he's forestalled while out in public now racking his body.

Moving to her replicator to call for a cup of coffee, Kathryn is already crossing her arms defensively. She has silently endured Owen's anger and Mitsu's knowing looks, and she refuses, after her very long day, to find patience for Tom's inappropriate humor.

"I still think it was a sound move," she says, petulantly. "It was worth the loss to cut off their nerve center." Pausing the coffee cup in front of her mouth, she adds "and we did _win_, after all."

Whether its her done tone, or her reference to Nechayev as a 'nerve center'- as though she were the blasted Borg Queen- Tom doesn't know, but something about her response only makes him shake harder, his laughter now punctuated by loud snorts.

The display earns him a death glare from woman standing in front of him, and he attempts to still himself, if only to catch his breath.

"Kathryn," he manages, his words still punctuated by laughter, "you shot her _in the back_."

Looking at him, she desperately wants to hold onto her anger. But at the sight of him completely undone by his mirth, coupled with the truth she finds in his words, her rancor quickly dissipates. In its place slips a dark amusement at her own actions.

She begins to chuckle, raking a hand through her hair that, she can feel, is out of control from having laid on the ground in mock death for four long hours.

"Their going to be talking about this for a long time, aren't they?" she asks, the flush of embarrassment finding her cheeks.

"Oh, yes," Tom responds, already moving to exit her office into his. "But at least you'll go down as the boldest assassin in the history of the war games."

Tom's exit is interrupted by the voice of one of their staff members, and Kathryn immediately smooths away all signs of her embarrassment.

"Sirs," Lieutenant Adams says, standing in the threshold that delineates Tom's office from the main one. "I'm sorry to interrupt."

Lieutenant Adams is the newest addition to their office, having been assigned to Janeway only two months earlier, a replacement for an officer who'd suddenly requested a transfer due to a family emergency on Andore.

Kathryn had been surprised with Tom's choice of Adams, as her last post had been under Nechayev. Still, she hadn't raised any objections, trusting Tom to make staffing decisions that would ultimately work out better than ones she herself would have made.

When she'd returned from Betazed three months earlier, she'd been interested to note that Tom had chosen to split the differences in their hiring preferences, selecting two of the candidates she'd favored and two of ones he had.

It was a diplomatic choice, she'd thought. Not at all what she would have done in his position.

As the few days had passed, she silently cataloged the differences in the four officers. The candidates she'd preferred have near spotless records, but turned out to be slow to ask questions or else to venture their opinions. They vacillate between being completely terrified of their bosses and being painfully eager-to-please. Tom's choices, on the other hand, aren't necessarily people who'd been at the top their class in the Academy, but they have more years of experience, and frequently, and without reluctance, voice innovative ideas. They don't seem scared of either Paris or the Admiral, managing to be respectful without being too formal.

She realized, only a week into the four officers tenure, that she vastly preferred the officers Tom had wanted. And she decided then, with a wave of irrational frustration at him, that she would let him make all hiring decisions from then on.

When she'd informed Paris of her decision, she'd successfully repressed the frustration from her voice, though not from her face. The Lieutenant Commander had bit his lip to keep from smirking at her, and recognition of what he was doing only made her glower more at him.

Looking at Lieutenant Adams now, Janeway realizes, without the accompanying frustration, that she, too, was a good choice, being far more at confident than her obsequious Andorian predecessor. Adams has learned much of the same back-channels Paris has, and has a fair amount of insight into the darker aspects of HQ politics, having worked under Nechayev for three years. The Lieutenant also never complains about her time in the full Admiral's office (something Janeway admires), but whenever Nechayev's name comes up, she adopts the same polite smile that Janeway and Paris do at the mention of the name.

This expression alone is enough to give the woman some degree of credibility in Janeway's book.

If only now she can break the Lieutenant of calling her 'sir.'

"Yes, Lieutenant?" she says, a patient expression on her face.

"Admiral Paris is here for you, sir."

Turning his back to Adams, Tom gives Kathryn a raised eyebrow. He assumes, just as she does, that Owen is here to vent his frustration about her behavior a few hours ago.

Buying time by sipping her coffee, Kathryn thinks, ruefully, that she'd expected Owen to ambush her days from now; perhaps over a friendly lunch.

For all his impatience in his personal relationships, Owen Paris is a remarkably patient adversary. Whether on the battlefield or in the negotiating room, he typically waits until his opponent is comfortable, springing upon them suddenly, when they least expect it.

Turning her back on both Tom and Lieutenant Adams, she inwardly sighs at the thought that her former mentor's anger is such that he's already beating down her door to lecture her.

"Send him in," she calls, feeling rather than seeing Tom's look of sympathy behind her.

. . . . .

"Please state your name and rank for the record."

"Chakotay. Captain, USS _Voyager_."

As the proceedings begin below them, Janeway feels herself fill with a now familiar rage.

It was a month ago that Owen Paris came to her office to inform her that Chakotay was being dragged in front of a hearing board for some infraction that, though small, fell just within the purview of such proceedings. And while Owen hadn't come out and said it, his implication was clear.

They were going after Chakotay not because of his former association to the Maquis, but his association to her.

The news had taken her completely off guard. First, because she'd expected Owen was there to admonish her than to break bad news. But more profoundly, because she'd started to believe that things were actually settling down politically.

Since Tom has joined her at Headquarters, her professional life has become predictable, almost enjoyable. Her permanent staff in place, she's begun to forge working relationships with them, attempting to build a trust with those who are under her, just as she did when she commanded her own ship. She will, she knows, never have a good relationship with some of the Admirals, but her rapport with others has largely made up for this.

She had become comfortable. In her better moments, even optimistic.

Watching Chakotay be disposed in the same large room she herself was deposed in ten months earlier, she sinks, with resignation, into the understanding that this is how she is going to spend the rest of her career. Watching angrily, helplessly, as the officers who loyally served under her on _Voyager_ are dragged into the light of scrutiny to appease political resentments against their former Captain.

Clutching her chair, she tries to will away the pain that floods her. Watching this is so much worse than going through it herself, and she's not sure how she's going to endure three entire days of it, let alone a lifetime.

When her fingers deeper into the material of her seat, she feels the pressure of a hand on her arm.

To her right sits Tom, and on the other side of him, B'Elanna. While his wife's face is set with the same anger evident in Janeway's expression, Tom's is completely expressionless.

Tom and Chakotay have never been close, but he finds the proceedings as outrageous as he does incomprehensible. An affront to a good man who has more than paid his dues.

Still, he isn't surprised by them at this point, and doesn't know whether it would be better or worse if Kathryn wasn't either. He offers his friend the same quiet support he does his wife, one hand touching Kathryn's sleeve, and the other lacing through B'Elanna's fingers.

Sitting in roughly the same seat he occupied the first day of Kathryn's trial, book-ended by women to whom the man below is like family- at one time, perhaps even more- he contemplates the irony that this is the home they fought so hard to return to. And feeling the current of emotion pulse through his former Captain, he wishes he could strip the same thought from her mind.

For his part, Chakotay doesn't seem particularly bothered. His dark eyes are stoic, his bronze face wearing roughly the same expressionless one as Tom's. The institution he now serves has disappointed him many times before, and this political maneuver isn't terribly meaningful to him. He will quietly accept his minor humiliation, focusing his energy on minimizing its effects on those he loves, before returning to his ship and waiting crew.

In a brief pause in the panels questions, Chakotay's eyes flutter up to the figure sitting several rows below the trio.

His wife's blonde hair is pulled back the way she used to wear it when he first met her on _Voyager_. Her normally rigid posture, further tensed with outrage, invites no companions. Meeting her eyes that swim with tears, he offers her a meek smile.

When the hearing breaks for lunch it is after a round of particularly harsh questioning. B'Elanna, fighting back angry tears, storms out of the auditorium to compose herself. Tom watches her all the way to the exit, but doesn't follow, slumping slightly in his seat when she's gone.

Tom and B'Elanna have been living their carefully-orchestrated schedule of four nights apart and three together for more than four months. Only one day a week is B'Elanna off entirely, and not once, to Kathryn's horror, has B'Elanna's day off fallen on one when her husband is also home from work.

Kathryn thinks, at first, it is the nature of B'Elanna's schedule that this happens. She and Tom are both slaves to the HQ calendar, and their days off, however predictable, cannot be easily manipulated. It isn't unreasonable to assume that B'Elanna's schedule at Utopia Planitia is like this as well.

Beneath that, she's suspected that B'Elanna could choose whatever day off she wanted, no day in her grueling schedule being any worse than others to be away. The fact that the engineer has arranged to be off for Chakotay's hearing only confirms Kathryn's suspicion, and she consciously represses any outward sign of the emotions the confirmation elicits.

Watching Tom sink heavily into his seat, Kathryn wonders how many times he's had to see B'Elanna walk away like this, his wife forcing herself to deal, alone, with whatever emotion consumes her.

She slumps in her own chair, mirroring Tom's posture, and her right shoulder brushes against his. A token of comfort and friendship, be it conscious or unconscious.

Tom feels the pressure on his shoulder, but doesn't think to move. When his eyes lock on the familiar blonde head below them, Kathryn expects him to ask her, with his expression if not his words, why she isn't going down to comfort Seven. But instead he only looks at Seven with sympathy, and when he glances at her shortly afterward, it's with the same pained expression.

She realizes, with acute discomfort, that he understands more than she ever imagined, and gropes to fill the silence that she abruptly finds stifling.

"You were his first pick for First Officer, you know."

She fails to keep the guilt out of her voice when she says it. She has begun to worry, these last few months, that she has trapped him in her dismal world of politics and back-fighting. Prevented him from again doing the things he used to love, from flying once more among the stars.

"I know," he breathes. "Harry told me. Although for the life of me, I have no idea how he came by that information."

She chuckles, the noise sounding more hollow than happy.

"Harry Kim always has always been like a dog with a bone when it came to information he has no business having."

"Despite all his pretenses to the contrary," he tacks on, his own laughter somehow mirthless.

Scanning the room, she sees that the four of them are the only officers from _Voyager_, past or present, to be in attendance, Chakotay having issued the same order she did before her own hearing. She pushes away the relief she feels at the observation, but behind it, finds only a dull aching.

"I miss Harry." It's a small statement, but her voice makes her longing for her old life plain.

"I miss . . . everyone," he responds, his voice echoing her own need.

The evidence of his pain distracts her entirely from her own. She places her hand on his arm, just as he did for her an hour earlier.

"You can still take the assignment, Tom. I hear the present XO might be getting his own ship."

Immediately, he shakes his head.

"I want to raise Miral on Earth," he says, and she nods in understanding.

Space is a dangerous place, and the crew cabins that remained darkened when _Voyager_ pulled into Jupiter Station remain a painful testament to that.

"Besides," he adds, meeting her gaze, "if I left, then I would miss you."

When B'Elanna sits down again on the either side of Tom, Kathryn is still smiling softly, her hand on Tom's arm.

. . . . .

"Is everything okay with Tom?" Owen ventures hesitantly, shooting Kathryn a furtive glance as he forks another bite of his lunch.

Kathryn unconsciously shifts her gaze to the man in question, presently sitting several meters away from them.

The table he's chosen is a now crowded one, though more because of his own presence than anything else. On either side of him, members of Kathryn's staff watch with amusement as Commander Batel, head of Sulu's office, needles their Lieutenant Commander slightly, a subtle mirth radiating from the half-Vulcan's seat.

She watches as Tom makes some kind of deadpan reply, the entire table, save Batel, erupting in raucous laughter. The former pilot joins in, but Kathryn can tell even from her position, two tables down, that his laughter is forced.

"It's been a long morning," Kathryn replies, shifting her eyes back to her plate.

The reply isn't necessarily false. They did, in fact, spend three long hours in a briefing room filled with some of their least favorite members of the brass.

At the end of the meeting, when Nechayev submitted for later discussion a suprise proposal for training maneuvers along the Romulan border, other flag officers tried to hide their amusement when Janeway offered a carefully researched counter-proposal. As Janeway, never faltering, outlined the proposal's exploration of training solutions that wouldn't compromise the upcoming negotiations with their erstwhile foe, Nechayev regarded Lieutenant Adams with a long, cool stare.

Adams had looked back at the full Admiral with same unphased expression that her boss did.

"I heard," Owen replies, letting the matter drop.

Venturing one more glance at Tom, Kathryn doesn't know whether to feel relieved or guilty.

After almost a year of Tom working for her, she has become as much the keeper of her former pilot's secrets as he is of hers. She finds truthful, if vague, things to say when Owen asks about B'Elanna or his granddaughter. She forces chipper small talk whenever Harry, on leave from _Voyager_, has dinner with the two of them at Tom's apartment; the younger man silently cataloging the dwindling traces of B'Elanna.

She mimics, in conversation with the dozens of colleagues and friends they have in common, both the disarming charm and misleading smile Tom adopts when her mother comms from Indiana, inquiring about her daughter's health and happiness.

She does not comment out loud, ever, on his mood to their staff. Instead, she signals with a small glance when they should give the Lieutenant Commander a wide birth, just as he communicates with a slight shake of his head when they should leave the Admiral be.

They are each other's apologists and co-conspirators. They withdraw, week by week, into the protection of each other's company; sitting together at meetings and social gatherings, searching out the other's presence as one seeks refuge under awnings to avoid gusts of wind and rain.

At Tom's table, the same forced laughter rings out. Kathryn does not think to look up again, knowing, without visual confirmation, the practiced smile that's on Tom's face.

. . . . . .

Later in the day, Kathryn finishes up the last of the work that needs to be completed before they leave the office.

Tom remains behind to wait for her, but today, so does their staff. It is the end of the week, and they have, several months ago, adopted the custom of going out as a group to a small bar on Clement Street. As the sun sets through the window of her office, the light finds the portraits on her mantel, as well the small petals of the blue plant that sits beside them.

She came into her office two months earlier to find the orchid- which, even without her assistant's aid and comfort, still clung feebly to life- gone from the corner table. On the long mantel by her window sat the pot that previously contained it, a small arrangement of phlox in the ailing plant's place.

She hadn't said anything that morning. It was the second day of Chakotay's trial and they were both in a mad dash to square away all their work before the afternoon hearings begun. But later, packing their things away before heading to the proceedings, she had questioned Tom, casually, on the orchid's disappearance.

"Did it finally die?" she asked, her use of the word 'finally' the only hint that she'd desired its demise.

"No," he replied solemnly. "I'm afraid when I went into your office to get something, I accidentally knocked it to the ground." He added, looking into the satchel he packed, "I'm sorry."

Shrugging off his apology, she failed to question how, sitting in the far corner of her office, the plant had possibly been disturbed by his movements.

"These things happen," she murmured, waiting for him by his door. "We'll just try to be more careful with the phlox."

Waiting for him now in the same spot, she watches as he yet again packs up his work.

"Ready?" he asks, looking to her, and she nods, moving to join their waiting staff.

Pub night goes as it normally does. There are a few awkward silences as the fall around the table, but the Admiral or the Lieutenant Commander head them off before they linger, and, by and large, the time is enjoyable.

Janeway's staff now trusts her, likes her, though she isn't sure whether its because of her renewed efforts in this regard, or the fact that the five officers trust Paris implicitly, and he, in turn, makes no secret of his devotion to the Admiral.

As is their usual habit, Paris and Janeway stay longer than their staff, though they drink less than anyone else and every drop they touch is synthehol. At least, while their officers are present.

When Adams finally bids them farewell, leaving them alone at the table, the Lieutenant casts a lingering look at Paris before exiting the dim light of the bar.

Janeway watches it without comment.

For six weeks, the blonde woman has been looking at Tom like this, but Tom actively ignores it and Kathryn never thinks to feel concerned. Kathryn knows, with painful certainty, that despite the state of their marriage, neither Tom nor B'Elanna will fall into an affair. They will continue to sink themselves into the distance of their relationship. Even, likely, celibacy. But they will not seek out in others what their spouses have failed to provide.

Neither of them will add one last crippling deluge of regret to the pool that has already accumulated between them.

When Lieutenant Adams has gone, Kathryn signals to the bartender for two scotches, neat, and Tom favors her with a small smile. This night is, as it has been for the last six months, the first of the two nights that Miral will stay with B'Elanna on Mars. He will go home, after he leaves the world of work behind, to an apartment that is empty, save the clutter of his child's toys.

He is especially grateful for Kathryn's company on such occasions. However, looking now at her patience face and searching grey eyes, his gratitude is tempered by hesitation.

"Talk to me," she says, after the flush of real alcohol spreads faintly across their cheeks.

He pauses, looking into his empty glass, but not moving to take the third round that sits only centimeters from his hand. She watches him, but doesn't prod with further questions or even her expression. She simply waits, sipping her own scotch, and savoring the familiar burn as it travels down her throat.

"B'Elanna petitioned for divorce," he admits, meeting her eyes only when the silence stretches.

Across from him, she doesn't bother to feign surprise. She places her hand on his, continuing to wait for his mask of indifference to fall. The dam that holds back his regrets to finally break.

"One week short of two years," he remarks bitterly, and she remembers, with a stab of pain in her stomach, that his anniversary is only eight days away. "Not a stellar performance, even for me."

Shaking his head, he brims with the fear that he will be missing more of his child's life. The anger at his wife's mistakes. Icy, jagged thoughts of self-loathing at his own missteps.

Kathryn knows there isn't anything she can say to console him. She has become a specialist in regrets, but those native to marriage, these remain foreign to her, despite two previous attempts to wed.

"You know, even in the best of times, you think about how things might end," he volunteers after a while, his voice low and contemplative. "You worry what will happen to the two of you if things ever get hard. . . It haunts you sometimes, like a waking nightmare."

"That's normal, I suppose. . . Worrying about the future."

Her voice is gentle and she grips his fingers tightly, their scotch now forgotten on the table.

"As many times as I thought about it, I never pictured this," he admits, his words just above a whisper. "I envisioned screaming matches and being at each others throats. Arguments that would go on for days."

He lets go of a labored breath, his voice breaking when he continues.

"Never in a million years would I have thought that things would end in silence. In daily transports and muted looks of frustration. . . A two-line request for the dissolution of my marriage, sent to me from my wife's work terminal on Mars."

Looking down at their entwined hands, Kathryn sheds the tears that Tom's eyes, still dismayed, cannot, yet, bring themselves to part with.


	5. Deception

**Chapter 5: Deception**

Sitting in her office, Kathryn listens to Tom bid their staff farewell for the evening. And as she waits for the last officer to leave, she tries to analyze how long, exactly, she and Tom have been on their present course.

They began sleeping together exactly one month ago. And though his divorce had been final for three months by the time it happened, Kathryn feels a looming sense of guilt.

As if they have been secretly sleeping together for months. Maybe even years.

The night it physically started, he came to her apartment for dinner, as he has done more than two dozen times before. But this time, after their meal was finished, she ended up pressed between the coolness of the large window in her living room and the searing heat of Tom's body.

"There are only two conditions," he'd said, his voice muffled as he dragged his mouth down her bare torso.

"What?" she'd managed, her mind already barely able to comprehend his words.

"No secrets."

He paused, flicking his tongue over the sensitive skin around her navel, and the fingers that were in his hair clenched against his scalp.

"And we don't pull punches."

At the time, she would have agreed to spend a summer wandering Death Valley naked, without so much as a canteen of water. Anything, in order for his mouth to continue on the path it was traveling.

But still, she'd nodded. And it's an affirmation she feels the weight of long after Tom's no longer pins her to the window.

While Tom's conversation with Zim faintly drifts into her from the outer office, she mentally examines their entire to relationship from the beginning, going all the back to when she first fetched him from Auckland.

She can honestly say, with utmost confidence, that she didn't have sexual thoughts about him when they were on _Voyager_.

She had recognized him as objectively attractive, of course. But he was so young and bitter back then, and she so desperate to help him fit in- to see him grow into the officer she knew he could be- it didn't even occur to her think of him in that way.

They did, admittedly, have a way of talking to each other on the bridge; a characteristic banter that others had no idea how to join in on and that privately drove her First Officer insane. But even that was harmless, and she can still clearly remember how surprised and uncomfortable she felt the day she'd overheard Harry accusing Tom of flirting with her as she walked by their table in the mess hall.

"I can't believe you," Harry had hissed.

"What? What did I do?"

"She's the _Captain, _Tom. You can't . . . you can't talk to her that way!"

"What are you talking about? I said one word to her. And it was 'hello'."

"Yeah, but it was the _way_ you said it. The way you _always_ say it."

"You mean like I like her as a person? Or that, unlike you, I'm not terrified to be in the same room with her?"

"Both."

As often as she's recently reflected on the words she spoke at Tom and B'Elanna's wedding, the genuine and profound joy she felt when they had Miral, the shattering pain she felt for each of them the entire year that she watched their marriage fall apart, she cannot block out Harry's words from their first year in the Delta Quadrant.

Nor can she can make herself forget the faint feeling that lingered under her horror when she'd heard it.

Was it merely being flattered, or something verging on curiosity? Even interest?

Hearing Zim finally depart, Kathryn tries to push away her thoughts for another time. Tonight is the first of the three days a week that Miral now spends on Mars with B'Elanna, and Tom will accompany her back to her apartment, which, unlike his, isn't in a Starfleet building.

She has been ticking time away in her head for the last four days, waiting for this evening, though it isn't that she actively wants his child to be away from him. She adores Miral, and misses the sound of her tiny feet toddling through the office; loves the look on Tom's face when his daughter smiles at him, babbling something with eyes alight with concentration.

But no matter how much Tom misses her when he has his daughter, we won't sacrifice a moment with Miral for their affair. He doesn't ask his father to watch his child so that he can slip off to her apartment. He doesn't cart the little girl with him to spend the night with her, forcing his child to sleep in an unfamiliar bedroom while he waits for her to nod off.

And as much Kathryn wants him even more because of his unfailing commitment to his daughter, it makes for four long, painful days.

"Ready?" Tom says, poking his head into her office.

"Yes," she replies emphatically.

Despite the lecherous smile she'd given him when they left their office, Tom takes note of the fact that she's quiet on the way to the transport, as well as the short walk to her apartment afterward.

He worries when she's like this. It means she's been thinking about something without him. Stewing about who knows what.

"What's wrong?" he asks, when they finally enter her building.

"Nothing," she lies.

The unconvincing attempt earns her a withering look.

"I've just been thinking. . . about _Voyager_."

He knows immediately from her tone that she doesn't mean the ship's current mission, or Chakotay's crew. He also knows that whatever she's contemplating has probably been bothering her for days.

"What about it?"

Leaning against the wall of the building's lift, he looks at her questioningly.

"Did you think about me before? I mean, before B'Elanna."

He pauses, following her out into the hallway and down to her door.

"Are you really asking about before B'Elanna? Or are you wondering about during?" he asks, once her door is closed behind them.

She balks a little. But only because he's called her out with complete accuracy.

"I guess both," she concedes.

He shrugs.

"Maybe, in the beginning, I had a crush. If you could even call it that. But it faded. . . I didn't spend seven years pining for you, if that's what you're asking."

The reply is what she thought she'd wanted to hear- what she'd needed to be told to alleviate her guilt. But somehow, it makes her feel worse.

He takes note of her subtle deflation, coming around the counter of her kitchen to wrap his arms around her waist.

"Why is it that there's no right answer, with you, hmm?" he teases, nuzzling her neck.

"There's a right answer," she says, half-distracted by the contact. "It's just that not even I know what it is sometimes."

Later, lying against him with her face on his chest, her mind picks up the same thread it had previously considered.

"Why did it fade?"

The questions comes out of no where, and Tom pauses for a moment to figure out what she means.

"My crush on you?"

He feels as well as sees the nod of her head.

He should have realized earlier that this was a bad road to go down. She deals even more poorly with the past than he does. And he understands, too, what her personal life was like on _Voyager_.

The isolation, the loneliness.

Everyone, from his father to B'Elanna, was so relieved for her when there was nothing in her leaked personal logs that could be considered tawdry. A few vague remarks after New Earth; a cryptic comment after Inspector Kashyk. One uncharacteristically emotional entry after Quarra. But that was it.

Tom had privately found it crushing more than anything else. The diary of a woman who, night after night for seven years, came home to an empty bed.

If only she didn't now act as though at any moment he might leave her alone with an empty bed once more.

"I changed. . . I grew. It didn't seem appropriate to think of you that way. After that first year, whatever attraction I'd felt for you was replaced by respect. Gratitude for the chance I'd been given."

She searches his face, and he arches a defiant eyebrow at her. Daring her to find a trace of insincerity.

She doesn't, and settles back into his chest with a warm sigh.

. . . . . .

Tom feels convinced, walking the HQ grounds beside Kathryn, that no one knows they are having an affair.

He was terrified when it first began. Scared witless that they would be discovered. But she seems so sure these days that no one would find out, he tries his best to relax.

It isn't the first or the last time Kathryn Janeway would sway him with by a confidence that would prove ungrounded in the long-run.

Presently, they are walking back to their office after a disastrous meeting with the full admiralty. The one redeeming feature of it was that Nechayev had been called away halfway through, thus interrupting her hour-long battle with Kathryn.

"Tell the truth," he says, looking deadly serious. "Did you steal Alynna Nechayev's Academy boyfriend or something? Maybe get a better grade than her in your Warp Theory course?"

She glowers. He knows damn well that Alynna Nechayev went through the Academy almost two decades before she did. He's just needling her to get her mind off the day's events.

"Are you trying to handle me, Mister Paris?"

"Handle you, ma'am? Never."

If they weren't in public, she would kiss that smug smirk off his face. Touch him to complete distraction. Then suddenly leave the room with a smug expression of her own.

She fakes a smile to a passing member of Owen' staff, glancing at Tom as she waves to the woman in the distance.

"You're going to pay for that later."

He smiles at her, unphased by the threat.

"Oh, I hope so."

Entering their office, Kathryn rolls her eyes.

"Everything alright, ma'am?" Adams asks, looking at the duo with curiosity.

"Fine. The Lieutenant Commander was just being himself. Which is to say, completely exasperating."

Snorts erupt throughout the office, and Tom favors their staff with a mock glare.

"Traitors. All of you."

As Kathryn heads to her office, she asks her assistant whether there are any messages she needs to return.

"Admiral Paris commed you, ma'am. I believe he wanted to set up lunch with you, but said it wasn't anything urgent."

Kathryn looks at Tom briefly. She and Owen have lunch off campus once a month, but Tom usually joins them and the invitation is thrown out casually rather than arranged through her staff.

Tom shrugs slightly. They both know that his father has been considering retirement for several years now but each time manages to talk himself out of it.

He always cites some event or other that requires his continued efforts, but Tom and Kathryn both know the truth is that Owen doesn't want to spend his days kicking around an empty house. His wife is dead, his daughters off world. His son is close by, but works just as much as he does. There isn't anything to come home to anymore.

"Set something up for later in the week," Kathryn responds, before heading into her office.

. . . . . .

When a last-minute conference on Vulcan is announced, Kathryn is forced to reschedule her lunch with Owen Paris for the second time.

The trip will fall during the weekly period that Tom is without Miral, but when Kathryn asks him to go with her, he looks back at her hesitantly.

"It'll raise more suspicions if you stay here, Tom. Everyone else is bringing at least one member of their staff."

Looking at her over the dinner table in his apartment, he knows that she's right. But raising general suspicion isn't exactly the nature of his concern, and they both know it.

Venturing a glance at Miral, who is playing contentedly in the living room, he fails to hide his reluctance.

"Tuvok is going to know," he says, rising with his empty plate and hers. "He's going to take one look at us and he's going to know immediately."

"You're being paranoid. Tuvok is perceptive. Not an empath."

He lets go of a ragged breath. When it comes to Kathryn, Tuvok might as well as be an empath.

He can just imagine the Vulcan's piercing stare falling on him in some meeting. The way he'll fidget, sitting beside his commanding officer and lover, who somehow remains perfectly calm.

"Fine," he says, relenting.

He doesn't want to go but knows that it's a part of his job. And even if he is sleeping with his boss, he won't let his personal feelings interfere with his duties.

"You worry too much."

Her voice is soft, slightly teasing, as she places a kiss on his temple, moving to say goodbye to Miral.

"Have fun with your mommy tomorrow," she says, winking at the girl.

Miral giggles in response to Kathryn's instruction, reaching again for her godmother when she pulls away to head for the door.

. . . . . . .

Standing in the turbolift, Tom fidgets.

"Please hold still before you start to make _me_ nervous," his companion chides.

"You don't get nervous about this. Which is something I find completely maddening, by the way."

Silently, he contemplates the reality that all of her nervous energy about their relationship has transferred to him. He considers the possibility that the transfer happened during sex. Like some kind of disease.

He glances sideways, eyeing Kathryn with suspicion.

"It's just Tuvok, Tom. And besides, the conference is almost over with."

He bites back his reply as they make their way down building's corridors, taking a seat at the still empty table they've been assigned to for the reception.

Looking around nervously, he continues in a hushed but slightly panicked voice.

"I don't care what you say. He knows. He's been giving me that… perceptive look all day."

Next to him, she rolls her eyes.

"Maybe he just wonders why in the world you keep shifting nervously. Besides," she adds, "if he figured it out, he would have already said something."

He only looks at her incredulously.

The last word he would use to describe Tuvok is cowardly, but he thinks the former Security Chief also hasn't lived to the ripe old age of 116 by picking arguments with people who have tempers like Kathryn's.

When Mitsu Sulu drops into the seat beside her, Kathryn fills with relief that Tom will have to put both his worries and petulant looks aside.

"So, what is my favorite command team talking about?" Mitsu asks, favoring Tom with one of her delicate smiles.

"In truth," Tom begins, smiling back innocently, "I was just about to inform Admiral Janeway how utterly infuriating her confidence can be."

Sulu only laughs at her colleague's entirely put-off expression, settling into her seat as Admiral Hayes gears up for what, no doubt, will fail to be the short speech he's promised.

When Kathryn makes it back to San Francisco, she finally arranges to have her long overdue lunch with Owen Paris.

Sitting across from him in the small restaurant just outside of Berkeley, their meal nearly finished, she waits for him to approach the subject he's patiently avoided since they arrived.

When he finally settles his gaze on her, she regards him with an encouraging smile, hoping that whatever decision he's going to inform her of is a painless one for him.

"I know about you and Tom, Kathryn."

He utters the statement as he stares coolly at her over his water glass, and she immediately feels her entire body freeze.

He remains silent. Not so much waiting for a reply as allowing his words to sink in.

"How long?" she finally manages, schooling her features as she pushes her plate away.

"A week before I first contacted you for lunch."

She struggles to contain her horror that he has known for five weeks and waited to confront her until now. She wants to bury her head in her hands, curse herself savagely for falling into the infamous Paris ambush.

Instead, she looks at him impassively.

When she doesn't respond, he picks up his fork again, picking judiciously at his salad.

"I shouldn't even be approaching this with you unofficially. But I care about your careers. . . Even if you don't seem to."

His subtle shift in tone as he finishes betrays his anger. His accusation.

And as much as she wants to recoil defensively, she knows he's right.

It would be one thing if it was only her own professional reputation she was playing with, but isn't. It's Tom's career she's jeopardizing, too. And as much as they've both knowingly engaged in their relationship, she's the one who's charged with professionally protecting him.

The one who's told him repeatedly for the last four months that they have nothing worry about.

Turning her eyes to the window next to them, she examines the rocky shore of the Marin beach that the restaurant overlooks. On a jagged peak, a gull perches, contemplating the tide that teems with fish below him; the darkening sky above warning that rain will soon interrupt his plans if he doesn't hurry.

When Owen continues, his voice sounds distant. As though it's coming to her over sound of the rushing water and quickening wind.

"The way I see it, you have three choices. Tom can transfer out of your office. Or the two of you can end your relationship."

"What's the third?" she asks, her voice sounding small and far away.

"Tom can resign his commission entirely." He pauses, adding, "But I'd liked to think that even in your current fit of selfishness, you won't allow him to consider that."

He doesn't voice the option that she could resign her own commission. And the silent question of whether he thinks she wouldn't do this for anyone or, else, that she simply wouldn't do for Tom is one that smacks her with more force than anything he's actually voiced.

When she looks back him, her expression is one of open pain. Reflexively, he softens, leaning perceptibly closer to her over the table.

"I'll give the two of you a few days to decide what you'd like to do. After that. . . you're going to be putting me in an unfortunate position."

She nods, no longer trusting herself to find her voice.

"Kathryn," he begins again, this time sounding hurt, "I know that things haven't gone the way you wanted since you _Voyager _made it home. But being this recklessness isn't like you. And as much I'm afraid to know how long this has been going on. . ."

At the beginning of his last sentence, her mind immediately snaps to attention.

"Owen, Tom and I didn't start seeing each other until well after his divorce from B'Elanna."

He eyes her suspiciously.

He wants to believe her, she knows, but they've already been lying to him for months. And even before that, Tom was never open about the problems in his marriage. His divorce came as complete shock to his father.

And now, of course, he wrongly believes he's figured out the cause of the sudden end of his son's marriage.

"I know that you and Tom didn't often talk about B'Elanna, and despite all of this, it still isn't my place."

She looks at him, her eyes suddenly pleading.

"But there are things you need to understand for Tom's sake... You need to believe me when I say that he was despondent when things ended between them. That before they did, we were only friends, and our friendship had nothing to do with what on between them."

After a moment, Owen reluctantly nods. He knows that she may not be above lies at this point, but he still believes she's above lying about something as important as this.

At least, he wants to believe she is.

. . . . .

When Zim informs him after lunch that the Admiral has canceled all of her afternoon appointments and won't be returning to the office until tomorrow, Tom completely freezes.

Only once has Kathryn canceled her day at a moment's notice, and it was when her mother was briefly taken ill in Indiana. Even then, however, she'd commed him to let him know.

Her assistant seems just as mystified as he is, so Tom simply nods, going into his office to deal with the afternoon work that has now unexpectedly doubled.

When he finally disentangles himself from the office, it is after 19:00 and he is nearly blind with panic. She hasn't returned any of his attempts to comm her apartment, and neither her mother nor her sister have heard anything.

When the attendant at her building's door informs him that Admiral Janeway returned home a little after 14:00 and has yet to depart again, he doesn't know whether to feel relieved or angry.

"You scared the hell of me," he says, entering her bedroom to find her buried under a pile of blankets.

He sits down heavily on the bed next to her, quickly realizing that she's been crying for sometime.

"Your father knows," she says, her voice somehow even.

He looks at her with confusion, his mind refusing to recognize what's right in front of him.

"Knows what?"

"About us… He hasn't told anyone, but he gave me an ultimatum. Either you transfer out of my office or we have to stop seeing each other."

She can't see his face, but she hears his heavy release of breath, followed by the bed shifting as he crawls in beside her.

He doesn't say anything, but she knows what he's thinking. An immediate transfer within Headquarters will be difficult if not impossible to come by. He will either have to take a post outside of San Francisco, furthering disrupting the fragile pattern of life he's established for his child, or he'll have to let go of their relationship.

As his chest repeatedly expands and contracts against her, she replays for the hundredth time this afternoon the words that have kept her company in bed.

She hasn't thought much of Tom's quote from her trial in months. But today, his words have revisited her with a new-found darkness. A knowing taunt seeming to rest just behind the apparent sincerity.

_For the record, never have I met someone who inhabits life with greater grace or sense of responsibility than that of Kathryn Janeway._

Pressed against the man she's once more let down, the last thing she thinks to call herself is responsible.

"You know that I love you, right? That we're going to find a way to work this out?"

His voice is partially muffled by her pillow, and she rolls over to face him, her eyes open and questioning.

They've shied away from using this word so far, though she hasn't been sure whether it's just been her reluctance or his, too.

It hasn't been a question of whether or not she loves him. Seeing him with his daughter, looking at him during the quiet moments in their office or here, in the privacy of her apartment, she knows with complete certainty that she does.

But assigning the label feels like openly courting certain danger. Daring fate to tamper with their happiness, to throw insurmountable obstacles in their way.

Maybe, even without the label, it already has.

She buries her face in his chest, his arm wrapping around her and his hand stroking her back.

"All I know is that I can't lose you, Tom. I don't know I'd make it through work everyday without you."

As she settles into him, allowing herself to be taken over by the exhaustion that's followed her all day, she feels the hand on her back still in its lazy pattern.

. . . . . .

When Kathryn wakes from the nightmare she's been having, she rolls over to find that she's alone in her bed. Her sheets, twisted around her from her movements, are damp with the evidence of her fear.

"Tom?" she calls, going into the living room.

When she doesn't find him, she assumes he's gone early to meet the transport that carries his daughter back from Mars.

Throughout the day at work, Tom remains mostly quiet, speaking to the staff in soft tones and keeping banter to a minimum.

She understands his reserved mood. He has come to enjoy their staff as much as she does, perhaps even more so, and it's going to be difficult to part with the officers who've worked under him for the last fourteen months. Even if doing so means keeping his relationship together.

He goes off to lunch alone, and she lets him, content to give his space while he contemplates the changes that are about to take hold in his life.

It isn't until the end of the day, when he slips out with Lieutenant Adams and the rest of her staff instead of waiting for her, that she realizes something is actually wrong.

Walking to transport station through the afternoon fog, she replays the day's events, searching for why he's upset. It isn't until she gets off at the Richmond stop that she remembers her exact words the evening before.

She realizes, with a blinding sense of panic, that he's misunderstood her.

She makes her way quickly to his building, ignoring the stares of the young couple on his floor when they see an Admiral practically sprinting down the hallway.

When he opens his door, he doesn't move to allow her in. Just beyond him, Miral's dark eyes are transfixed on the television that Tom retained from his quarters on _Voyager_.

In front of her tiny figure, her father stands defiantly, his blue eyes filled with open accusation.

"Tom, we need to talk."

"I think you made your position perfectly clear yesterday."

He doesn't address her by rank, but he might as well, given his tone.

"I didn't," she presses. "Or at least, I think you misunderstood what I meant."

He backs away from the door, allowing her entry, but it's clear from his expression that he doesn't believe her. That he thinks she meant to end things before, and is now trying to backpedal.

He calls for two cups of coffee before sitting down at the small table in his kitchen. When he hands her one of the mugs, she immediately sets it down, forgetting about it.

"When I said that I couldn't make it through work without you, what I meant is that you're the only thing that keeps me going most of the time. That my relationship with you anchors me."

He regards her coolly as he sips his coffee, and she's abruptly struck by how much he resembles his father.

"So I anchor you. Like some kind of docking clamp. How nice."

She finds his sudden emotional distance completely shattering, and immediately leaves her seat to invade his physical space.

"I don't mean it like that," she responds, her voice desperate rather than angry. "I just mean that you've steadily become the best part of my life. The most enjoyable part of my life. And you have been since before our relationship began."

He softens perceptibly, sitting back in his chair. She doesn't think twice before taking of advantage of his position, lowering her body into the space between his torso and the table.

"Things could settle down politically," he warns, even as her arms snake around his neck. "When your professional life takes off again in the way you want it to, a relationship with me won't seem quite as rewarding as it once did."

"I'm not with you because other things fail to make me happy. I'm with you because you make me happy period."

He looks at her questioningly and she presses her forehead to his.

"I love you, Tom. And that isn't going to change, no matter what happens in our careers."

"Promise?" he asks, his fear finally breaking through the mask he's erected.

She kisses him briefly, pulling back to communicate with her expression her complete and utter confidence.

"I promise."


	6. Ignoble endings

**Chapter 6: Ignoble endings**

Tom's departure from Kathryn's office is easier to choreograph than either of them could have ever hoped.

Two days after Owen's ultimatum, Mitsu informs Kathryn that one of her officers will be transferring immediately to Starfleet's strategic command center on Andore.

"Her predecessor's departure was rather hasty," Sulu confides, her eyes twinkling with dark amusement as they sipped their coffee. "He was caught having an affair with the Andorian consul's daughter."

When Tom informs her he would like to be considered for the vacant position, Sulu doesn't look surprised by his willingness to leave the woman whose side he's been by for the last nine years.

She simply smiles at him, leaving him alone in her office with his growing suspicions as she goes outside to chat with her assistant.

Three months later, Kathryn strolls into Mistu's office at lunch time, per her new custom with Tom.

Mitsu's office is smaller than Kathryn's, Sulu working mostly on counterintelligence. But all three members of her staff, now including Tom, have the rank of Commander.

"If you've come for Tom, you can't have him back," Mitsu teases.

"I only want to borrow him for lunch."

"Well, in that case, take him. He's been pestering me all morning anyway."

Kathryn fails to hide her amusement at her friend's uncharacteristically frustrated tone.

"What in the world has he been doing?"

"Reminding her to call her mother," Tom replies, emerging from his office.

In front of him, Mitsu rolls her eyes. He decides she's been spending far too much time with Kathryn.

"I would have thought you'd learned by now not to meddle in women's relationships with their mothers," Kathryn remarks, her face the picture of innocence.

Tom grimaces, knowing that she's referring to the last time he went home with her to Bloomington, making the fatal mistake of getting in the middle of one her mother and sister's epic arguments.

Heading to the transport that would take them back to San Francisco, he'd hung his head in silence, having been thoroughly chastised by both female members of Kathryn's immediately family.

"You would think so," he responds, tucking a PADD under his arm. "But apparently I'm a slow learner."

As Tom and Kathryn pick their way through campus, a few people stare at them, but less than either of them would have expected three months back.

Anyone with an ounce of common sense has likely deduced why Paris made the switch to Sulu's office. But there seems to be delightfully little chatter about it.

"I think we're getting off easy," Kathryn had said to Owen, several weeks back.

Grateful, mostly for Tom's sake, that they weren't being followed with interested eyes and whispered conversations.

"Or they're just saving the information for when they need it," Owen had replied.

She'd thought about the comment for an entire afternoon, pausing more than she usually did when Lieutenant Adams gave her a searching stare.

"She's so terribly fond of you," Kathryn says now, remarking about Tom's relationship with his new boss.

"I'm rather fond of her, too."

Looking at him, she smirks.

"Should I be worried?"

Tom laughs out loud at this. Mitsu Sulu has been living with the same woman for the last fifteen years.

"Have you met Elizabeth?" he asks, leading them around a corner.

"No, though I've been hoping the four of us could have dinner at some point."

"She looks a lot like you." He raises an eyebrow, adding, "she has your temper, too."

"Maybe you should be the one who's worried then."

She watches with amusement as he feigns injury.

"You'd leave me now, after all I've done for you? The fact that I left my job at a moment's notice?"

"Your new job came with a promotion and an office twice the size of your old one. It wasn't exactly a sacrifice."

As they enter a building that houses some of the transporters, Kathryn looks at Tom expectantly.

"Marseilles?" she asks, her face hopeful as he regards her with a contemplative expression.

"I was actually thinking Bloomington. I need to redeem myself with your mother."

She sobers for a moment before she realizes that he's teasing her.

"One does not joke about surprise visits to a woman's mother, Mister Paris."

He only laughs at her put off expression.

"Marseilles it is, then," he proclaims, and she shakes her head in exasperation.

. . . . . .

It's six months after Tom's transfer that Command informs Kathryn they'd like to move her into the field.

She tells Tom over dinner at his apartment.

Afterward, sitting out on the balcony with Miral playing at their feet, they're surrounded by the rapidly cooling air and quickly settling doubts.

"This is what you wanted, Kath. To get out from behind a desk."

As he speaks, he look out at the park where children continue to play, despite the setting sun.

"I wanted them to trust me again," she responds, watching his face refuse to embrace the pain that's consuming him. "But I never thought this would happen. I didn't think I'd ever have to leave you."

He doesn't remind her of her promise six months earlier that no matter what happened in her career, they would stay together.

Silently, she decides that she prefers the look of open accusation he'd worn that day over the expressionless one he wears now.

"If you don't accept it, they'll never give you another chance. They'll punish you yet again for your failure to fall in step with what they want."

She isn't sure if he's giving her an easy way out because he worries she'll resent him if he doesn't, or simply because he assumes she's already made up her mind on some level.

Either way, he's right.

"This doesn't have to end just because I leave San Francisco. . . Couples are separated all the time because of assignments."

He gives her a pointed look and she turns her face away from him, toward the park that stretches out below them.

They both know that however much he's willing to sacrifice for her, he won't put himself through a long-distance relationship again. He won't commit himself to suffering the slow death of a love affair, punctuated with transports and comm links, and then, eventually, silence.

"It doesn't have to end," she says again.

Watching Miral play at their feet, he wishes that Kathryn's confidence was still something that swayed him.

. . . . . . .

The day she's scheduled to leave San Francisco, she does so two hours before she is supposed to meet Tom at his apartment.

She knows that all of things she's ever done, slinking away without so much as a word to him is by far the most cowardly. Still, she can't bring herself to say goodbye to him in person. Staring into eyes begging her to stay, even though his words won't.

Packing up the last of her office, she places one pot of phlox carefully into a storage container.

In the last year, the plant Tom gave her grew steadily, having to be transplanted into various planters as it continued to surpass the space it was provided.

Looking around at the blue pedals that fill her office, she tries to push away the thought that it looks like a cemetery. A final resting place.

She hadn't wanted to recycle the rest of the plants, but she's no longer left with any other choice.

She can't give them to Owen to care for. He's horribly allergic to them, as was proven sometime ago when he had to flee a meeting in her office because of a convulsive, sneezing fit. She considered, too, asking Mitsu to take them, since her office is already boasts a wide variety of flowering plants and bonsai trees.

She'd dismissed the thought just as quickly, not wanting Tom to have to come into work every morning to a room filled with the remnants of a relationship that suddenly crumbled around him.

Calling for the lights on her way out, she leaves with her belongings and regrets in tow.

. . . . . .

Tom doesn't contact her once she leaves San Francisco, and she convinces herself that things are better this way. That a clean break is what they both need.

She tries to sink herself completely into her new work, clocking excruciating hours and flying from one corner of the quadrant to the next.

After six months of putting out political fires before they can erupt into military flare ups, she can no longer remember why an empty bed and endless diplomatic missions was more attractive than her life back in San Francisco.

Later, she reads, with mixed emotions, the several articles Tom has published since her departure from Headquarters. One is on humanitarian implications of rethinking the Prime Directive, and three others articulate the problems of using transwarp technology.

All of them are beautifully written compared to the dry works typically published in the academic journals, and each of them are well received.

Tossing the last PADD down with a thud on her couch, she doesn't bother to call for the computer to lower the lights as she moves toward her bed.

Sleep won't come to her even in darkness. It hasn't for sometime.

When she has the chance to come aboard _Voyager_, she jumps at it. It has been almost a year since she was able to see Harry Kim or Chakotay, and thinks it will be comforting to be around her former officers, surrounded by corridors she walked for seven years.

Venturing a glance at Harry on her second night aboard, the young man looking painfully awkward over his dinner, she regrets her lack of foresight in pulling the strings it took to arrange passage on her former ship.

"How's Tom?" she asks, attempting to sound casual.

Harry fidgets slightly in his chair and refuses to meet her gaze.

"Fine, from what I gather. I know he was going off world with Admiral Sulu for some part of this month."

"Oh? It's surprising he's joining her. He seemed reluctant, after _Voyager_ got back, to leave the safety of Earth."

She doesn't mean the observation to come out as bitter, but somehow it still does.

Harry regards her evenly, his jaw perceptibly clenching before he looks back down at his plate.

"I know Tom doesn't like being away from Miral, but at least it's easier for him to get away now. B'Elanna being in San Francisco."

Pausing at his words, she sets the coffee cup that's hovered in front of her mouth back down.

"She's not living on Mars anymore?"

Glancing at her again, Harry shakes his head.

"The schedule got to be too much. There was a part-time teaching position open in the Academy's engineering department, so she took that, I think with some help from Tom's father. She still consults for Utopia Planitia, too, but she works on all the specs from Earth, I think."

Neither of them comment on the irony that though Tom and B'Elanna's marriage ended with her on Mars, their divorce will now involve only a few hundred meters of distance.

Eventually, dinner settles back into its previous awkwardness. And Kathryn feels unabashedly relieved when the ship goes to red alert.

"Status?" she assk, coming onto bridge.

If it were anyone else, they might be irritated by her presumptuous manner. But Chakotay simply looks at her with the faintest trace of amusement.

"We've just received word from the USS _Orion_ that the negotiations on Pullock V have broken down. There are apparently hostages involved."

"Last I heard, the _Orion_ was transporting Admiral Sulu," she remarks, sinking down into the seat he'd once occupied.

Chakotay looks at her with a measured expression, his voice dropping slightly when he begins to speak.

"Captain Matthews seemed reluctant to reveal anything over comm link, but it sounds like the Admiral and a member of her staff are among the hostages."

As her breath catches in her chest, Chakotay watches all of the color drain from her face.

"Time to intercept?" she queries, her voice as even as it's always been.

"Three hours, roughly."

Nodding, she straightens in her chair.

Trying, for the life of her, not to stare at the seat Tom Paris once occupied.

When _Voyager_ hails the _Orion_, it's Tom's face that appears on the view screen, and Kathryn's fingers relax the grip on their chair.

"Captain," Tom greets, his face grim.

"Commander," Chakotay responds with a nod. "What's your current status?"

"Permission to beam aboard to discuss it, sir?"

"Of course," Chakotay agrees, already rising from his chair.

When Tom enters the briefing room, he looks somehow older than Kathryn remembers. It's been less than a year since she last some him, but the artificial light of the ship is unforgiving, highlighting every stray grey hair and wrinkle.

Still, he doesn't look so much worn as he does settled. The confidence with which he moves giving him gravity. His self-assurance evident, despite his obvious concern.

"We're planning an extraction of our people within the next hour, but I don't think any of our options are tidy."

Chakotay regards the former pilot with a searching look before the younger man continues.

"It's imperative that the Admiral is recovered quickly."

"We're all worried, Tom. But surely we can buy some time to plan our approach."

"It's imperative that the Admiral is recovered quickly," Paris repeats, his face now impassive.

Immediately, everyone in the room realizes that he's speaking as an intelligence agent guarding an asset with priority knowledge, rather than as a friend or even a subordinate.

Looking at the man he'd wanted as his XO, Chakotay simply nods.

"You have whatever we can provide, Commander."

Thirty minutes later, standing alone with Tom, Kathryn calls for their turbolift to halt.

"Do you really have to be a member of the extraction team?" she asks, crossing her arms.

Staring at the man she left almost a year ago, she thinks he's doing this deliberately to worry her. Perhaps to prove to her that he's not grown soft, remaining behind a desk.

He looks back at her with only partially contained frustration. She hasn't said two words to him since he came on board, and now that she is, it's only to question his tactical decisions.

"Yes, Admiral. I do."

She deflates a little at the use of her rank, sinking back against the wall of the lift.

"What's really going on down there, Tom?"

He hesitates for a moment, but only to consider his reply. Even if she hasn't been briefed on Sulu's activities on Pullock V, her security clearance surpasses his own.

"Nominally, negotiations to bring the planet back under Cardassian rule. But the negotiations were a cover to track down energy signatures we've been getting from the southern most continent."

"Weapons productions?"

"Most likely," he confirms. "The Admiral and Commander Batel were transported away from the negotiating facility moments after we confirmed the location of energy source."

"Any word on either them?"

She doesn't bother to hide the depth of her concern for her colleague. Not from this man, who's witnessed far greater lapses than her inability to hide her fear.

In front of her, Tom's eyes momentary cloud before he shifts his gaze back to her face.

"Batel's already dead. . . I suspect he tried to buy time for the Admiral by feeding them false information under questioning."

She knows that he suspects this because it's exactly what he would have done, and without even a moment's hesitation.

Calling for the lift to continue on, they resume their original stances and their silence. Tom reflecting on the sacrifice his colleague nobly offered, and Kathryn trying to stem her gratitude that the sacrifice wasn't made by the man beside her.

. . . . . .

When the extraction proceeds, it's as messy as Tom predicted. They recover Sulu from a holding facility on the southern continent, but doing so comes at the cost of three officers, including one member of _Voyager_'s security team.

When the group materializes on _Voyager_, both the Admiral and Commander Paris are both badly injured. The former from enduring hours of apparent torture, and the latter from using his body to shield Sulu when an explosive blast caved in the side of the tunnel the team been navigating.

Chakotay watches silently as _Voyager_'s doctor repairs their injuries, Kathryn taking up watchful residence behind the glass of Sickbay's office.

When Tom begins to regain consciousness, Kathryn quickly departs.

_Voyager_'s Captain simply watches her go, wishing he were at least surprised by her decision.

"Welcome to the world of the living," Chakotay says, smiling down at Tom.

"Good to hear. . . Because I'm pretty sure staring up at you wouldn't be my cue that I've gone to paradise."

Chakotay fights the urge to roll his eyes at the fact that, after all these years, Paris still feels the need to taunt him. Even after he's barely escaped dying.

"The Admiral Sulu is resting comfortably. You should try to as well."

After a ghost of a nod, Tom's eyes slip shut. Blissfully unaware of the departure of the woman who has yet again fled rather than facing him.

. . . . .

When the door of her guest quarters chimes, she isn't surprised when it opens to reveal Chakotay.

"You left before he knew you were there," he accuses, the moment the door hisses shut behind him.

"Nice to see you, too, Chakotay. And yes, feel free to come in."

He ignores her menacing expressing and mocking tone.

"You should go see him, Kathryn. He was just released from Sickbay an hour ago."

She sits down on the couch with a ragged breath. Cradling her coffee cup in two hands, her defensive anger falters.

"I'm not sure what good it would do. . . I did a lot of damage, at the end. When I left."

He perches on the chair across from her, his face open and his eyes compassionate.

"If you had it to do over again, what would you do differently?"

He tosses the question to her in the same neutral way she used to approach Tom about B'Elanna.

Closing her eyes, she pushes away the memory of sitting in the office they used to talk in and thinking that it felt like a cemetery.

A place where things went to die.

When she opens her eyes again, he's still waiting for her to reply. The patient eyes that finally gave up on her years ago somehow looking at her now with understanding and affection.

"I would have stayed."

It's a simple answer, really. But the two of them know that it's one of the hardest she will ever come by.

. . . . .

When Tom answer his door, he still looks painfully pale.

"They really discharged you?" she asks, despite herself.

"There are a few privileges of rank," he responds, stretching out on the couch.

"So you threatened your way out of Sickbay."

"Don't sound so horrified," he chuckles weakly. "I learned it from you."

When he looks at her a moment later, their fragile banter falters. She suddenly finds herself searching for words as he stares at her with a familiar coolness.

"I'm fine, Kathryn. You don't need to worry."

"I know that," she says, still feeling as though all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the room.

"Then what is it you need, exactly?"

Scratching above her eyebrow, she pauses. Instead of responding immediately, she moves to sit on the coffee table beside him.

He doesn't complain when she invades his space. But his face doesn't soften either.

"I miss you," she confesses, eventually.

"Of course you do," he responds, and she thinks for a moment she's misheard him.

"I'm sorry?"

"Of course you do," he repeats. "You've been coming back to your empty quarters for ten months now. Filling your time with who knows how much work before crawling alone into a cold bed." He shrugs. "I'm sure I look pretty good right now. . . I'm sure anyone would, really."

"That's not true," she responds, immediately recoiling from the accusation.

"Isn't it?" he presses, his tone still shatteringly casual. "Is it incorrect to say that you've led most of your life burying yourself in work, over dozens of years and across two different quadrants? Whoever happened to be in love with you at the time coming in second- distant second- to your job and your ambition."

Instinctively, she stands up, wanting to put space between herself and his scathing commentary.

"I don't think that's accurate."

"No?" he asks. "Perhaps we should conduct a poll… We'll start with Chakotay, since he's conveniently located nearby. "

The remark is by far the cruelest thing he's ever said to her, perhaps the cruelest things he's ever said to anyone. And he delivers it without any trace of concern for how it will make her feel.

She spins around, shaking her head as her lungs to struggle to fill with air.

"You almost died, Tom." Her voice comes out as a plea. A desperate request for him to stop.

"You're right," he acknowledges with a heavy sigh. "But do you want to know what I thought about in the tunnel, when the blast echoed in my ears?"

Her back still toward him, she manages to nod her head.

"Miral. And you. . . The fact that I wouldn't see either of you ever again."

He pauses, and in the silence she turns to face him. To see for herself the pain now evident on his face.

"I would have died down there with a phaser in one hand and regrets in the other." He closes his eyes, his expression becoming rueful. "And as pitiful of an ending as I think that is. . . it's an even sorrier way to live."

Watching Tom pronounce his verdict, Kathryn realizes he isn't the same person who chose to sink into the background of his ex-wife's choices. Or even the same lover who made her promise not to hold back truths; to stay with him, despite whatever came.

He's a man who doesn't hesitate even for a moment, sitting on the deck of a ship she used to command, as he slices her straight through to her core.


	7. The more things change

**Chapter 7: The more things change**

It's three months after he sees Kathryn on _Voyager _that Tom is called up on charges by Command.

He is the fourth of her former crew to face a hearing board in the last three years. But this time, the allegations leveled aren't excruciating examinations of technicality that could, at maximum, result in a note in the accused's file.

Someone has leaked that Starfleet has begun to violate the Federation's own ban on the development and production of eugenic weapons, tests quietly being run on an uninhabited planet not far from Federation-Romulan border.

The Federation Counsil has issued long, meaningless proclamations, and the media is in a frenzy.

The Romulans are angry and demanding answers as to why these tests (which the Empire actually finds perfectly understandable in general) are being conducted so close to their border.

Conveniently, one Commander Tom Paris, intelligence officer and intimate friend of Admiral Kathryn Janeway, happens to have gone to the Academy with the younger brother of the reporter who broke the story.

Happens to be one of the twenty people who had access to the exact text that now plays on loop across the Federation.

Happens to have just published an article defending the inviolability of humanitarian principles, such the prohibition of certain weapons, even in military worst-case scenarios.

Sitting in his office, Tom knows the case against him is flimsy. That there will no additional evidence to levy against him because he is innocent. Still, the proceedings will bring embarrassment to his office. Likely, too, driving a wedge between Admiral Sulu and the rest of the brass when she moves to protect him.

His last name will once again become synonymous with scandal, following his daughter long before she is old enough to understand what the whispers and lingering stares mean.

After two days of thinking, he goes into Mitsu's office to tell her that he has decided to resign. That he just wants to salvage what he can for those he cares about, and move on from the political back-fighting and petty power plays that have dotted his professional life for the last three years.

His CO informs him, with characteristic ease, that if she has to drag him kicking and screaming to the hearings that will clear his name, she will. And that if he ever talks about resigning again, she'll make him keep commission. But bust him all the way down to Ensign.

He leaves her office not feeling any better about the situation, but puts aside his foreboding feelings when he picks up Miral from child care. He makes dinner while she plays around him in the kitchen. The loud noises of her latest gift from Uncle Harry reminding him to send his friend an unappreciative note for his choice in toys.

He isn't sure what happens in the weeks before his trail, but somehow Command loses steam in going after him. The charges against him are dropped, without apology or explanation, and he's informed he must still appear in front of a hearing that's been convened to gather information.

Halfway through the first hour of questions, he realizes that she's there, halfway up the auditorium. His attention has started to wander when he sees her. He has spent the last five minutes looking around the room, taking in the expressions of the officers he knows.

Studiously trying to avoid Mitsu's gaze, her delicate features beset with uncharacteristic rage.

He expects to see the same anger in Kathryn's eyes, but there isn't any. Only a profound sadness; a pain that stretches beyond the room and the proceedings.

He gives her a weak smile. The same one Chakotay gave to Seven more than two years earlier, sitting in the same chair.

When the proceedings break for an hour, she waits for him by the exit.

There isn't any media present, the proceedings barred to all but the upper echelons of Starfleet. The quiet they walk out into is somehow more disconcerting than an ominous din of people.

"I'm glad my father isn't here to see this," he says, when they're out of the main building and several meters down a back path.

She doesn't know what to say to his admission At least, not immediately.

"I'm so sorry about his passing, Tom."

Her words can't capture the way she felt when she'd heard that Owen had died.

Standing in a hallway outside of a negotiating room, weeks away from Earth, she'd tried to control the pain that worked its way through her body. The tears that swam in her eyes, clouding her vision.

"He died behind his desk," he remarks, with a disapproving shake of his head.

Pausing, he looks over at her, meeting her gaze for the first time since they left the auditorium.

"I should have held the funeral for you."

"It's alright. I understood. . . You knew I wouldn't have been able to make it back quickly."

She doesn't voice the thought that he may have assumed she wouldn't come either way, but the thesis dances between them like the cold wind that moves their hair.

"No," he replies firmly. "I should have held it. You were as much family to him as I was."

They both know that the comparison is fitting. That despite Owen's affection, they both suffered the his disapproval and the burden of his expectations. One just dealt with it a little earlier than the other.

She shrugs off the comment as they turn the corner, assuming their conversation will fall painfully into small talk and discussions of the friends they have in common.

"I'm sorry about the last time I saw you," he says instead.

She looks surprised but quickly recovers.

"It's okay. . . You were angry. You had a right to be, anyway."

"A right to be angry, yes. I right to be cruel, no."

The regret plays across his face until she touches his arm gently. Even then it doesn't disappear, though mostly overtaken by a contemplative expression.

"Still. I've been thinking about what you said. . . Your comments hit home, no matter how you intended them."

He doesn't know how to answer this, and so he simply holds the door for her, allowing her to enter the building before him.

"Hungry?" she asks, and he shakes his head.

"No. But I could use a break from Headquarters."

"Someplace far away from here," she soothes, leading them down the corridor.

. . . . .

"I'm not sure why he dropped the charges. I mean, I know they couldn't make them stick. But that didn't stop them from bringing them in the first place."

The confession comes halfway through their time at the Marseilles restaurant. Neither have anything in front of them but cups of coffee, and he looks out the window as though the object of his confusion rests just beyond the pane.

She shrugs slightly, but the expression he sees in the window gives her away.

It appears she's not as good at lying as she used to be.

"You managed it, didn't you? You pulled strings. Threatened them. Did something to make them rethink charging me."

She ducks her head. A confession.

"I've watched them bury a lot of bodies over the last year." She adds, sounding rueful, "helped them bury some of them, too. . . There's a lot I could say that would further damage their reputation."

He eyes her even though she refuses to meet his gaze. His expression vacillates between gratitude and pain.

"When are they transferring you back to San Francisco?"

He doesn't bother to ask if they're sending her back. He knows with certainty she'll be published for her betrayal.

"Effective immediately," she confirms.

Something about the way she says it makes it clear she isn't really all that sorry, and he wonders, as they drink their coffee in silence, what else has changed about her.

"I don't want you to sit through the rest of the hearing," he tells her, as they walk back to transporter station.

She looks hurt at first, and he touches her arm in the same she did his less than an hour earlier.

"I don't want you to give them the satisfaction," he clarifies.

"It would feel like I was abandoning you, Tom."

She regrets the words as soon as they're out of her mouth, but her embarrassment ebbs when he looks at her with sympathy rather than a rueful expression or dark smirk.

She contemplates the possibility of giving a public statement, dismissing the idea again, as she has several times she's thought about it.

What could she possibly say that would be fitting? What words could she string together that wouldn't pale in comparison to his, three years earlier?

"I know. But I don't want you to have to sit through this." He adds, sounding disdainful, "I don't want them to see you sitting through it."

She nods in reluctant agreement, walking back with him to the main building just the same.

"Have you gotten your staff together yet?"

He asks just outside the building's entrance and she's thrown off by the question, looking at him quizzically.

"Zim's available. Stephanie Adams, too, if you want her."

"Really? I thought Mr. Ul took an assignment back on Belarus."

"He did," he replies, smiling. "But apparently being near his parents isn't quite what it's cracked up to be. . . I think maybe I should introduce him to Harry one of these days."

She chuckles at the joke.

Harry Kim, for all this pining for home the seven years away, was the first to leave Earth's orbit for an assignment. Fleeing, at warp speed, the smothering attentions of his mother and father for the far more soothing, untold dangers of deep space travel.

"And Lieutenant Adams?"

Here Tom pull's a face, shaking his head slightly before he even begins to voice his response.

"She's back in Nechayev's office."

"What? Why?"

She doesn't bother to hide her horror. It's same one that's painted all over Tom's face.

"The Admiral fired someone without notice. Since she was in between assignments, she was transferred to fill the position."

Kathryn immediately fills with sympathy for the blonde woman, who not far away on campus, is likely being made to pay for betrayal.

She knows just how she feels.

"Will I be able to extract her?"

The implication of the term isn't lost on Tom, and he smirks back at her.

"It's a temporary position. Expiring next month, I believe."

She nods with confidence; the same way she used to when she exited her ready room on _Voyager_ and sat down in her chair.

"I'll do it," she responds.

He smiles at her before disappearing into the building with a wave.

. . . . .

Things at Headquarters haven't really changed much. Hayes remains a windbag and Nechayev holds icy court.

Still, sitting in a meeting, Kathryn takes note of the subtle differences.

The officer who leaked the eugenics information turned out to be the one Nechayev unceremoniously discharged from her staff. And in the aftermath, the full Admiral is a little slower to throw her weight around. Afraid (almost) to find out how much less it gets her after the recent scandal was tracked back to her own office.

Hayes, unfortunately, is just as verbose, and when he finally ends one of his epic monologues, Kathryn quickly thinks to recommend a recess.

"At least the Romulans aren't as wordy," Mitsu remarks darkly to her, a comment on her friend's sudden return from the field.

Kathryn forces a smile, silently watching the exit of the colleague who stands from the seat beside her.

Sulu is still her closest friend among the brass, but these days she shares more of Kathryn's pessimism about campus politics. Privately nursing scars left by the tragic death of her chief of staff and friend. More rapidly accumulating others, due to her new appreciation for Headquarters' darker realities.

Her eyes trail Mitsu to the door, the voice from just a meter away coming as a surprise.

"Settling in alright?"

Tom's chair is just on the other side of Mitsu's, accompanying her as her new head of staff, in the wake of Batel's death.

She looks across from the table at the chair that has remained empty during the meeting. No one daring to slip into the seat that Owen Paris once occupied even three months after his passing.

"I miss your father," she confesses, alone in the room with her former pilot and ex-lover.

"Me, too," he agrees.

When she looks over at him, he smiles reassuringly over the empty seat that remains between them.

. . . . .

The next morning when she comes into work, she goes to into her office to find a large azalea bush between the mantel and her desk.

She immediately recognizes the pink flowering plant as the one from the entryway of Owen's office, the azalea being one of the few things that didn't set off his allergies.

Just beside it, on the mantel, she finds a note.

_It doesn't really fit in my office. I hope you don't mind the addition. - Tom_

When she exits into the main office, Zim studiously refuses to look at her. She stands menacingly by his desk as the young Bolian pretends to be completely absorbed in her calendar.

"Something I can help you with, ma'am?"

Lieutenant Adams tone doesn't betray anything, but when Janeway narrows her eyes at her, a small smile threatens at the corners of the young woman's mouth.

"No," Kathryn responds finally, when Adams doesn't break.

She disappears into her office for the rest of the morning; just her, the azalea, and her multiplying questions.

By the time she heads to lunch, she's at a complete loss. She sits down across from Mitsu with an uncharacteristic slump.

"Everything alright?"

She studiously ignores her companion's knowing stare as she picks at her plate.

"Strange morning," she responds, inviting no further inquiry.

After a few minutes, familiar laughter at another table draws her attention, the sound she would have found painful several months ago now seeming strangely reassuring.

Tom still holds court in the lounge; her staff, as well as others, flocking eagerly to his table. Beside him, Stephanie Adams chuckles, hiding her face behind her hands when Tom continues his anecdote.

Looking at them, she feels a dull pain form in her stomach.

"There's nothing go on there," Mitsu offers, seeing where her gaze has settled. "He's never looked at her twice and I think she gave up a while ago."

When she tears her eyes away from Tom, she looks moodily at the woman who has called her out.

"Has anyone ever told you that your perceptiveness is annoying?"

"Yes," Mitsu replies, going back to her lunch. "Tom. And Elizabeth. Everyday."

Kathryn forks her lunch with unnecessary force, and her friend chuckles at her.

"The two of you are painful to watch, you know that? Him with his vacant expression and you with your pretense of not caring."

She remains silent, not sure how to respond to Mitsu's commentary.

"He hasn't dated anyone else since you left. Hasn't even looked, as far I can tell."

She rubs eyes with her hand, the sign of fatigue not going unnoticed by the man who breezily banters several meters away.

"I'm not sure what to say to him. . . There's so much that's transpired between us, and most of it not for the better."

Sitting back in her chair, her friend looks completely exasperated.

"Anything has to be better than this, Kathryn."

"Better than what?"

"Silence. And painful looks of regret."

Going back to her lunch, Kathryn regrets asking the question. She decides, too, that Mitsu has spent far too much time with Tom.

. . . . .

When Kathryn turns up at the door of his apartment with a bag full of groceries, Tom regards her with questioning expression.

"Have you and Miral eaten?"

"No," he responds, moving to let her in.

"Good, because I thought I cook dinner for the three of us."

At this, he crosses his arms. She hates to cook, and even if she didn't, she's downright horrible at it.

"Are you sure you don't want me to do the cooking?"

"I suppose I could be persuaded," she says, moving to greet the child who's noticed her arrival.

As they cook dinner together, he eyes her suspiciously. Not quite convinced, perhaps, that this isn't some elaborate joke, or else, a holoprogram he's forgotten to shut off.

He hasn't seen at all in the last week, and when his gift of the azalea was met with silence, he resigned himself to the idea that things between them couldn't be repaired.

Looking at over the steaming pots in his kitchen, he doesn't know what to think.

The way she stands, even chopping vegetables, reminds him of the woman he met in New Zealand, rather than the exhausted one who limped home to an unfortunate homecoming.

After dinner is over and Miral has demolished the table, he turns the child loose to play in the living room.

When Kathryn gets up from the table he thinks it's to clean. Before he can rise himself, she drops down into his lap, positioning herself between the table and his body.

He looks at her with trepidation.

It isn't that he doesn't want this. He does. But he's just so afraid.

"There's one condition," she says, wrapping her arms around his neck.

"What's that?"

She pauses, running her hand along his cheek.

"No one leaves," she replies, her voice serious.

He looks at her, considering her offer for a moment that feels like an eternity.

In the times that follows this, arguments will arise and feelings will be hurt. There will be shouted comments and angry footsteps, tears and longing looks. Even the occasional threat of silence.

But never will either of them break the commitment they make here. Not because of the vow. But because, at the end of the day, neither of them desire to be anywhere else but with each other.

"I accept."

Sitting in his lap, she smiles wildly before kissing him, his child looking on with interest.


End file.
